cockneyize

English

Alternative forms

cockneyise

Etymology

cockney +‎ -ize

Verb

cockneyize (third-person singular simple present cockneyizes, present participle cockneyizing, simple past and past participle cockneyized)

1. To pronounce with a cockney accent.
   • 1882 January, “The Right and the Wrong Use of Words”, in The American, volume 3, number 76, page 234:

     After some sensible remarks to the effect that, before a word beginning with an aspirated “h,” (“heroic,” “harangue,” and “historical,” for instance,) “a” should be used, and not “an,” unless you choose to cockneyize and weaken the aspiration of your “h's,” it is declared that we should avoid the error of not repeating the article, and that we must say, instead of "an ivory handle and silver blade," "an ivory handle and a silver blade," and instead of "an arbitrary and conventional language," "an arbitrary and a conventional language."

   • 1887, Charles Augustus Chase, Some Great Charitable Trusts of Great Britain, page 41:

     The cockneyized form of Bethlehem, "Bedlam," has long been an accepted and significant word in our vocabulary.

   • 1893, Journal of the American Medical Association - Volume 21, page 818:

     It is a great pity that an excellent dictionary should be used to cockneyize the already bad pronunciation in use in this country.

2. To make vulgar and tasteless.
   • 1849, Theodore Edward Hook, Richard Harris Dalton Barham, The Life and Remains of Theodore Edward Hook - Volume 2, page 33:

     To sing such great statesmen and morals so pure, His first bard is Bowring—the second Tom Moore; Leigh Hunt was refused, as a cockneyized calf, And Rogers, for being too comic by half!

   • 1872, Report and Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, page 352:

     If the little history of Madison could not have been written without meddling with the caps and petticoats of its first ladies, and also selecting from the verdant brain of an old gray-headed idiot, trash concocted and cockneyized in London, then it had better ever remained a blank.

   • 1903, Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, a Popular Journal of General Literature, Volume 72:

     “We complain,” he says, "' of a hackneyed and cockneyized Europe; but wherever, in desperate search of the untrodden, we carry our much-labelled luggage, our bad French, our demand for a sitz-bath and pale ale, we rub off the pale bloom of local color, and establish a precedent for unlimited intrusion."

   • 1936, May Morris, William Morris, Bernard Shaw, William Morris: Morris as a socialist. William Morris as I knew him, page 476:

     The squalor of the farmers above mentioned is no doubt largely the result of stupidity, but with them poverty can be pleaded ; but the rich squire-archy and nobility are not forced by lack of pence to cockneyize the countryside; but yet so soon as ever you come across a village turned smart but dull by idiotic architect-tooral-looral excrescences and changes ; the cock-tailed school, the restored church, the Lady Bountiful cottages, the lodges of the Bayswater pattern, the carpet gardening of the vicar's garden and so forth, then look out for the big house of my lord or Sir Robert, or Captain Killmister, and ou are sure to find it presently and unless it be an old house, or you have not got the real use of your eyes, you will be heartily sorry that you haven't missed it, such a lump of ugliness and vulgarity it will be.