I found the following sentence in this article and was trying to understand it. I could get the meaning from the context, but I cannot deconstruct the sentence at all.
They introduced pugnacity, backbone and bottle, the latter in the old cockney rhyming slang sense of "bottle and glass" – arse.
I understand that cockney rhyming slang refers to the way London East Enders use multiple phrase words in place of single words, but other than that I am completely at a loss in understanding the sentence.
- What does "bottle and glass" mean in London dialect?
- How does one understand the use of 'arse' in this sentence. (I mean
grammatically, not the sense in which it was used)?
P.S. If the question seems to be muddled, it is because I could not understand the sentence enough to even ask a coherent question.
Also, I searched google and ngrams for the usage of "bottle and glass", but came a cropper.