If you haven’t come across Polari, it’s essentially a cryptolect, a secret language of Old London, lasting from some hard-to-pinpoint date in the nineteenth century to about the 1960s. It’s usually associated with the gay subculture, but also with subcultures more or less associated with that subculture: actors, circus and fairground people, Punch and Judy men, professional wrestlers (presumably because they were essentially part of the live entertainment industry – no one tell The Rock) and sailors; and, perhaps less obviously, sex workers and criminals.
Much of the lexicon is devoted to sex (‘trade’, ‘mollying’); body parts (‘willets’ for ‘breasts’); clothing (‘farting crackers’ for ‘trousers’); and money (‘gelt’). There are also various terms for the police (‘lilly’, ‘charpering omi’ or ‘sharpy’, ‘orderly daughter’).
It’s a magpie language – like English itself – with bits of Italian, Mediterranean Lingua Franca (which itself naturally had bits of Italian in it) Romani, backslang, rhyming slang, sailor slang and thieves’ cant; and, later, words from Yiddish and from the drug subculture. It’s therefore almost impossible to pin down. It is almost – but not quite! – the same as Parlyaree – the argot of fairgrounds since the 17th century, and which borrows more from Romani.
Some elements might be older than that. Shakespeare seems to have got there first, as he so often did: ‘bona’, later adopted as Polari for ‘good’, turns up in Henry IV part 2 as ‘bona-roba’ – ‘fine gown’ or, because it’s Shakespeare and no phrase ever means only one thing, ‘courtesan’. (Elsewhere in the same play we have this: ‘Buonarobba, as we say good stuffe, that is, a good wholesome plum-cheeked wench.’)
‘Polari’ itself is of course from the Italian ‘parlare’ – ‘to talk’.
But is ‘scarper’ from the Italian ‘scappare’, or from rhyming slang ‘Scapa Flow – go’? Is ‘camp’ from the Italian ‘campare’ (‘exaggerate, make stand out’) or from ‘camp follower’ as a euphemism for a sex worker serving soldiers?
(Sing! – ‘Po-o-o-o-lari / Oh, oh / Campare / Oh-oh-oh-oh…’)
Some terms are so commonly used that I had no idea they were part of the Polari lexicon: ‘manky’ (‘worthless, dirty’) is a Polari word from the Italian mancare, ‘to lack’. Also ‘ACDC’ (for bisexual), ‘butch’, ‘naff’, ‘ogle’, ‘slap’ (for makeup, particularly in the theatre). And of course ‘zhoosh’ in the post-Queer Eye world is well known (possibly from the Romani zhouzho – ‘clean, neat’).
Some terms haven’t passed into common use – possibly a good thing in the case of ‘alamo!’ for ‘they’re attractive!’ (from LMO, an abbreviation of ‘lick me out’). Ahem.
Others would now just lead to confusion: ‘troll’ in Polari is not an internet asshole (the language died before the internet, of course), but a verb meaning to walk about looking for sex. ‘TBH’, which to me is short for ‘to be honest’, was a Polari abbreviation for ‘to be had’ – i.e. sexually available.
Some words really ought to be more widely used. I really like ‘corybungus’ for ‘buttocks’, ‘munge’ for ‘darkness’, and ‘quongs’ for ‘testicles’.
I’ve called Polari a cryptolect, and it might have been useful for secret conversations; but then, in private, gays would have had no need for secrecy, and in public, signalling one’s orientation by any means would have been a risky business.
Dropping a Polari term into a conversation would have been a way of identifying yourself to another homosexual who knew the word – in the same way as, in the right time and place, you could signal your orientation by wearing a green tie, or an earring (but which was the ‘gay ear’? no one ever seemed to be sure). The gamble was that the plain-clothes policeman at the next table wouldn’t know the signal, but the person you were chatting up would.
In England and Wales, homosexuality was decriminalised by the Sexual Offences Act 1967, removing part of the risk, though not all of the need for secrecy: vigilante gay-bashing remained a dishonourable tradition that continues to this day. (Yes, I know, it’s declining; but it’s been declining for as long as I can remember, without ever having quite declined to zero.)
Linguist Michael Halliday classed Polari as an ‘anti-language’, something spoken on the fringes of society: a code, adopting the grammar of the national language but replacing the vocabulary – often with multiple words for the same thing, which he termed ‘over-lexicalisation’. That multiplication might have been consciously to keep one step ahead of the law; or it might simply have been because the speakers delighted in playing with the language.
Halliday also thought that secrecy was the only motive for creating and maintaining an anti-language. He thought that it also helps define a hierarchy within the ‘anti-society’. Fluency in the anti-language marked you out, indicating a degree of status. This might have been more relevant to other cryptolects, rather than Polari: thieves’ cant, or prison slang. But there were sometimes competitions, informally, as speakers tried to out-camp and out-bitch each other, in a queer prefiguration of later rap battles. (Rap, of course, has evolved its own cryptolects.)
Polari was probably already in decline by the time homosexuality was decriminalised, probably partly because the secret was more or less out – the outrageously camp innuendoes of Kenneth Williams on BBC radio show Round the Horne saw to that. (The show’s commissioners at the BBC claimed they didn’t understand the references.)
Indeed, many gay rights activists hated Polari, as being symbolic of a repressive era they were trying to do away with, and as a kind of minstrelsy, a ‘safe’, socially acceptable way of being gay,
Even so, Polari has never quite gone away.
In 1990, Morrissey (who later decided to try for the title of Britain’s Top LGBT Bigot, beating Milo Yiannopoulos but losing out to David Starkey in the final) released the single Piccadilly Palare’, later to appear on his compilation album ‘Bona Drag’.
In the same year, Grant Morrison’s excellent comic ‘Doom Patrol’ featured a transvestite street (yes, really) – Danny the Street spoke Polari (and was one of the best characters in the story; and helped to save the world, more than once).
In 2017, trainee priests at Westcott House, Cambridge – a Church of England theological college – conducted a service in Polari, to mark LGBT History Month. Was it controversial, even in 2017? Well, it was the church, so yes, it was. One might even go as far as to call it a palaver.
An opera in Polari – ‘The Sins of the Cities of the Plain’ – premiered in Seville in 2019.
The Polari that echoes in these examples, though, has perhaps little to say about modern questions of sexuality and gender. It was able to subvert gender roles and identities, but in subverting them it effectively entrenched them; there is more interest now in casting them off altogether. Polari came into being in a world of straights, butch or effeminate gay men, and butch or effeminate lesbians. It has no real language for the asexual, the non-binary, the transgender, or indeed anything beyond its own stereotypes.
But this is a hopeful development, I think. If Polari has become a historical gay curio, then that’s at least partly because the reasons it existed have to some extent fallen away, at least in the London where it was born. It shouldn’t matter any more – should it? – in which ear you wear your earring.