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Polari: "Ooh vada well the omee-palone ajax who just trolled in - she's got nanti taste, dear, cod lally-drags and the naff riah but what a bona eek. Fantabulosa!" Translation: "Have a good look at that homosexual nearby who just came in. He's got no taste - awful trousers and tasteless hair - but what a lovely face. Absolutely fabulous!"
John Foster would not need the above translation. As a steward in the 1950s merchant navy he spoke Polari every day for seven years, at sea and on shore. For him and thousands of other gay men it was both a means of expression and a protective code.

"Everything was illegal in those days and you had to be very careful," he recalls. "I always looked straight, I never minced about, so dropping in the odd Polari word would be a way of checking the other person out. If you liked the look of someone at the theatre, you might say to them, 'That was a bona scene, wasn't it?' If they were straight they wouldn't pick up on it but if they were gay there might be a shriek of recognition: 'She's camp, this one.'"

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[ 15 July 2003: Message edited by: badlydrawngirl ]

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Ads in the gay press, and "generally making a nuisance of myself everywhere I went", produced nearly two dozen interviewees aged from 50 upwards. "All of them remembered it fondly, even proudly. They'd been taught it by older men almost as a way of passing down the values of gay subculture from one generation to the next. They were also often given camp names, usually women's, as if they were being given a new identity and a sense of belonging."

The origins of Polari probably lie in the 19th-century slang Parlyaree used by fairground and circus people, as well as prostitutes and beggars, and it also has links to the older vocabularies of other stigmatised groups or outsiders such as thieves' cant, cockney rhyming slang, yiddish and the lingua franca of sailors. Usage reached its peak in the repressive 1950s when being gay was illegal and dangerous: men lived in constant fear of blackmail, exposure and the humiliation of electric shock and hormone "treatments", as well as imprisonment. The fact that the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were gay further fuelled public paranoia.

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Notes to self: (a) rent that movie (seeing portions on TV isn't enough) and (b) get and read the book.

Edited to add:

Dear Lord, it just gets better. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have translated the Bible into Polari.

[ 15 July 2003: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth.

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How bona to vada your eek!

It's a cant derived mostly from the lingua franca spoken by sailors (which itself is largely Italian based) as both a pidgin in various ports but also as an "inside language" as well as cockney, Yiddish and other slang spoken by marginal transient populations such as thieves, prostitutes and entertainers such as circus folk, carnies and touring companies of actors.

[ 15 July 2003: Message edited by: Mycroft ]