The Forgotten Secret Language of Gay Boys. After a heyday inside ’50s and ’60s, Polari just about vanished.
The Manchester Pleasure procession. (Photo: Pete Birkinshaw/CC through 2.0)
These days, very few anyone understand what this means to vada a chicken’s dolly eek.
Vada (“look at”), dolly eek (a pretty face), and poultry (a new guy) are common keywords from lexicon of Polari, a key code utilized by gay males in Britain at the same time when homosexuality ended up being illegal. Appropriate an instant decline inside the 1970s, Polari has actually all but gone away. But lately it’s come appearing again, even appearing from inside the words of a tune on David Bowie’s best album.
Polari is actually a words of, in linguistic teacher Paul Baker’s terminology, “ quickly put-downs, ironic self-parody and theatrical exaggeration .” Its vocabulary hails from a mishmash of Italian, Romani, Yiddish, Cockney rhyming jargon, backslang—as in riah to indicate “hair”—and cannot, a language employed by 18th-century traveling performers, burglars, and festival employees. (more…)