
Polari: the dead language of gay British men - Phithagoras
https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-polari-the-curious-after-life-of-the-dead-language-for-gay-men-72599
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grzm
Cants are fascinating. I hadn't realized until reading this article the
connection to Morrissey's "Piccadilly Palare" (which indeed is the intent),
which makes so much more sense now upon reflection.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piccadilly_Palare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piccadilly_Palare)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_(language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_\(language\))

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stonewhite
Here in Turkey, we have "lubunca" which is more or less the same with this
language, except it is still living. Entire Turkish grammar applies but there
is lots and lots of new words to keep the talk obscure.

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klodolph
Here's that short film in Polari with line-by-line translations and a
discussion of the etymology of the slang used. Scroll down to see the script,
some of the dialog is clickable with annotations.

[https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/10/watch-short-film-
explore...](https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/10/watch-short-film-explores-
lost-gay-slang-brits-used-avoid-arrest/)

~~~
agumonkey
powered by rapgenius... genius

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api_or_ipa
> Another group of activists called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
> created a Polari Bible, running a Polari wordlist through a computer program
> on an English version of the Bible.

> “And the rib, which the Duchess Gloria had lelled from homie, made she a
> palone, and brought her unto the homie.” Translation: “And the rib which God
> had taken from man was made into a woman and brought to the man.”

I'm interested how a language is judged to be distinctly different such that
it can be called a separate language and not a dialect or variant. If the
language heavily borrows sentence structure and filler words from English, is
it a separate language or merely a variant or dialect?

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apendleton
To the extent that there's a rule to go by, it's that in general dialects are
mutually intelligible and languages are not, and video of this speech is not
comprehensible at all to me (a native English speaker), so that arguably
pushes it into "language."

But of course there really isn't a rule, though. In practice what gets called
a language vs. a dialect is mostly political. Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian
are at least somewhat mutually intelligible, and Moldovan and Romanian are
essentially the same language but for a border in between, as are Bosnian,
Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin. By contrast, Mandarin and Cantonese aren't
mutually intelligible at all but are supposedly both "Chinese dialects," and
ditto for the various colloquial flavors of Arabic. The saying among linguists
is "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

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Angostura
And if you would like to hear Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick do their
stuff, here you go:
[https://youtu.be/OZL4rTEWU5c](https://youtu.be/OZL4rTEWU5c)

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DanBC
that was broadcast in 1965-1968.

Male same sex activity _started_ to be decriminalised in the UK in 1967, but
there were still many restrictions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_King...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Kingdom#Same-
sex_sexual_activity)

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0xBABAD00C
Russian "Fenya" is a living example of something similar (applicable to the
criminal/thief subculture), with bits and pieces of it having migrated into
everyday speech, like the word "garbage" for cops. There's a Polish, Romani
and Yiddish layer in it too, which should make it an amazing subject for
linguistic research, but I'm not sure if anyone is seriously studying it...

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cstross
This is regional slang rather than dialect, but in the UK — specifically
England, mostly northern England — "the filth" means "the police" (collective
noun — you wouldn't refer to an individual cop as _a_ filth).

I'm now wondering if this is parallel evolution to "Fenya" or some sort of
cross-fertilization.

~~~
0xBABAD00C
Convergent evolution due to similar environmental pressures, I presume :)

Garbage is a collective noun in Russian and can't have a plural, but in thief
jargon it's used as a singular noun for one cop (the garbage is on my tail),
and, hilariously enough, in a plural for multiple cops ("garbages were
whistling all night in the park", it's from a song).

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WD-42
The official IRC client for the GNOME desktop (popular desktop environment for
Linux) is named Polari.
[https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Polari](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Polari)

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cozzyd
Yeah that's what I was thinking about too... I wonder if it was intentional.
They do want you to pronounce the G in front.. .

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TazeTSchnitzel
Here's a short film in Polari:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yEH8TZUsk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yEH8TZUsk)

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khedoros1
Which is also embedded in the article.

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TazeTSchnitzel
So it was, sorry. I don't know how I missed it.

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kagamine
Because we are so used to seeing articles broken up by ads and other intrusive
media that we go from the last word of one paragraph to the first of the next
and skip the interruption?

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petercooper
Some Polari words live on in modern British English, such as bijou, camp,
cottaging, khazi, naff, and scarper.

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agumonkey
When George Michael passed away, I dug his whole life, and learned cottaging
on the way.

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kazinator
The Queen lyric "Scaramouche, Scaramouche, can you do the fandango?" seems
like some coded message in polari.

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greglindahl
Except "Scaramouche" and "fandango" are both in the dictionary.

~~~
kazinator
Polari has some common English words.

According to a table in the Wikipedia, for instance _cottage_ , a standard
English dictionary word, denotes a "public lavatory used for sexual
encounters" and _handbag_ stands for "money".

~~~
greglindahl
Do you really think that Queen is not using Scaramouche to mean the Commedia
del Arte clown and fandango to mean the dance? If I see a sentence with
cottage and handbag used like that, I don't think I'd be confused.

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petegrif
Kenneth Williams used it when a popular comic and nobody straight had the
first idea of the gay subtext.

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kagamine
Of course they knew, Britain has a long history of camp in the theater. They
maybe didn't know the words' meaning but they knew the gay subtext and
overtones.

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Ballantara
Their Polari bible translation has "unto the homie" == "to the man", so Polari
for "man" is "homie"! I think the modern slang homie comes from "homeboy", so
that'd be convergent etymology?

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grzm
Interesting. I'd (naïvely) guess Polari _homie_ would come from the French
_homme_ , so it would be convergent (as opposed to some shared etymological
root).

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jdminhbg
Looks like it's actually from Italian _uomo_ (plural _uomi_ ), and most places
seem to spell it "omie" without the "h."

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grzm
Cheers. Both share the same Latin root, _homo_ (man), correct?

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interfixus
Correct. However, the 'homo' in homosexual derives from Greek homo, meaning
'same' or something to that effect.

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grzm
Right. For example, homogenous. Or homonym. Not related to _homme_ or _uomo_.
No connection to homosexual was implied.

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mprev
As used by the characters Julian and Sandy in the postwar BBC radio comedy
Round the Horne.

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grkvlt
I believe at the time in the UK not just homosexuality (cf. Alan Turing) but
also depictions of it were illegal, so this was a way to have gay characters
without the BBC directors or censors realising.

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jdietrich
Depicting gay characters wasn't illegal, but it would have caused an almighty
shitstorm in the tabloid press.

In the 60s and 70s, British comedy and light entertainment was rife with
"confirmed bachelors" with a flamboyant manner - John Inman, Kenneth Williams,
Frankie Howerd, Larry Grayson etc. A metropolitan audience would see them as
obviously gay, but there was a level of plausible deniability, aided by
straight camp and drag performers like Dick Emery and Stanley Baxter.

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hluska
Articles like this remind me of how far we have come in a relatively short
time. From a world where gay people had to invent a secret language to afford
them some sense of security in a harsh world, to a world where gay people have
significantly more rights is a wonderful development. Good job to everyone who
fought to make this change a reality...

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unescape
Significantly more rights than who? Christians?

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fasquoika
Clearly they meant significantly more rights than they used to have

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yipopov
Shows the Church of England has ceased to be a church in any meaningful way.

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rothbardrand
The church's objections to homosexuality are an opinion that they have the
right to have-- the state's criminalization of it, however, is the violation
of rights which is a crime.

Homophobia is just stupid, government action is the real crime.

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rabble
I'm pretty sure the contemporary word we use for "female impersonators" is
trans.

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PhasmaFelis
Drag is certainly a popular outlet for trans people who can't be out in their
public lives, but not all drag queens (or kings) are trans, or even gay.

