- (speaking Polari)
Didn't understand that?
Well, it's not surprising, because you weren't meant to.
That was an example of Polari,
a secret gay language used by gay men and also lesbians
in England, more specifically London,
in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Now, to be fair,
language isn't quite the word we should use,
it's more of a cant,
a kind of set of words, phrases,
a lexicon that's used by a small group of people
in order to shut out outsiders
in some way or for some reason.
So, it's not surprising that
you didn't understand a phrase in Polari
and it's also not surprising that
you might not have heard of Polari before.
After all, it's meant to be a secret.
So, why have this language at all?
Well, there's a few reasons.
When it was popular, it was illegal to be gay in the UK.
What that meant was that you could
drop a word of Polari into conversation
and it might not get picked up by someone
if they were straight,
but if they were gay, it was a signal
that you could communicate back in a similar way.
Once you had identified if someone was also gay,
it allowed you to speak freely in public
about stuff that could otherwise get you arrested.
It also provided a vocabulary to talk about being gay,
gay sexuality, sex acts in a way that
just there wasn't the language for elsewhere in society.
Because Polari was used for this
kind of very particular purpose,
a lot of the words in Polari are used around people,
around identity, around sexuality.
They're words of convenience,
they're words of necessity.
So, for example, there are a lot of words for the police.
Or one of my favourite phrases that I found
while researching this video:
(speaking Polari)
Which means "nada," nothing,
"tevada" means to see,
and "in the lada,"
there's nothing to see in the light--
he has a small penis, basically.
Now, the origins of Polari words are hugely wide-reaching.
Some come from thieves' slang, from theatre terms,
from the language of prostitution.
Cockney rhyming slang, Yiddish, backwards slang,
Italian, French, Romani, lingua franca, and many more.
Because of its nature as a secret language,
it spread through word of mouth.
There isn't a definitive glossary of, like,
every term in Polari,
one just doesn't exist.
So, words would spring up organically in different places,
have slightly different meanings or spellings
if they were ever written down.
This means that the words we know now in Polari
and the way it's used in terms of context and grammar
are all about first-hand accounts from people
who use and used it themselves.
We know, for example,
from anecdotes and oral testimony that the language,
the Polari language and the sort of slang of sailors
was very much mixed in together
and one reason for this was the fact that
gay men, when they were in the streets of London,
would take Polari, they became sailors,
they would then use it on the ships.
For various reasons,
including being able to converse about passengers
without them knowing what they're saying,
especially if they were being insulting.
And so, you would straight sailors who
would be interested in learning the language of Polari.
So, they would learn that
and that would mix in with their slang that
they knew from sailing.
So, what we have there is a way in which
this language has a core hub of people
who are inventing it and using it and utilising it,
and then there are also these other communities
that start to use it as well.
And vice versa,
there are other communities that
are using this kind of slang words
and Polari takes from them.
Now, although, I said earlier that
Polari is a language that you might not recognise,
there are some words that are still in use
that you probably still know.
Words that I use, like, a lot of the time.
Calling something naff,
trying to blag something,
telling someone to scarper.
So, I looked through a tonne of glossaries
and listened to testimonies,
and these are words that are in Polari glossaries
that I personally still use or hear people use.
So, for example,
you might jojop your hair,
you might be on your tod,
you might put on some slap,
you might think something is naff,
you might ogle someone.
You might describe someone as mincing,
you might describe someone as a dish
or you might want to dish the dirt on someone.
There are also some words which I no longer use
that I did when I was a kid
that I assumed was just, like, '90s, early 2000s slang
that, it turns out, had its use within Polari
and as Polari's uses declined,
so, too, did those slang words, apparently.
So, for example,
clothes being referred to as clobber.
So, at the beginning of the video, I said,
"How bona ta vada your eek."
How "bona," good,
"ta vada," to see, to look at,
"your eek," meaning face.
So, literally translated, it's "how good to see your face."
But, really, it's like, "nice to see you."
Now, the word eek in that sentence is interesting because
you can see that it's gone through a slew,
a few different iterations of slang.
So, you start with the word face,
and then you go to backwards slang,
so it's ekaff.
And then you just shorten it to eek.
And there's some other shortened ones.
Ajax meaning they're bi,
some people posited that it was
because of the word adjacent,
that you shorten the word adjacent and it becomes ajax.
Now, a lot of my videos are quite academic
but because this is a language that
hasn't been written down and studied
and followed with, like, a continual usage
in the way that a lot of other languages might have been,
it becomes more difficult to look at it
in an academic way.
There's not that many sources
and the sources that are that have kind of been,
like, shared around,
so a lot of things that you're gonna read about it
will say pretty much the same thing in a different way.
But there are some resources,
and I'll link them in the description below,
including museums that have done stuff about it,
JSTOR's got some articles,
there's a book about it which is really fantastic as well.
But it does mean that you can't just hop on Google Translate
to work out how you would say something in Polari
or look at the etymology at, like, Dictionary.com.
But that, to me, is really interesting.
So, take the word camp, for example,
meaning effeminate.
There are actually a few different,
very interesting reasons why people theorise
that camp came into the lexicon.
So, for some people,
it probably came from the Italian word
meaning to live or to survive.
For other people,
I think it comes from the French word
to portray or to pose.
But there's also some people
who have a much more colourful reasoning behind it,
which is that it stands for K-A-M-P,
AKA Known As Male Prostitute.
Similarly, naft, meaning rubbish,
a lot of people say comes from N-A-F-F,
AKA straight,
AKA not available for fucking.
'Cause it's really interesting to me that
although these might not have been the origins of the words,
the kind of language that Polari is means that
that myth of how that word came to be in the lexicon
is just as important.
And what was really weird
when I was looking through these words and phrases
is that I, over the course of this week
I've been researching it, started to understand them.
I'm really bad at learning languages,
my worst subject at school.
And yet, I was looking at these list of phrases
and I was able to translate them pretty easily
and I don't know whether it's because
they're similar to, like, other words in similar languages
that I've learned,
but it was just really weirdly exciting
to be like, there's this type,
there's this piece of my, like, community's history
that I am removed from completely,
and then start to learn about and have this, like,
interest and affinity to.
So, for example, some of the phrases,
which I'm not gonna try and say
'cause I don't know how to pronounce them,
which is really weird, right?
'Cause this is a spoken language
and so, for most people, it would be like,
well, I wouldn't know how to write that phrase down,
I just know how to say it.
But for me, I'm like, well,
I can only look at it written down.
I don't know how to say it, but I know how to write it.
So, this one means, "I'm not into lesbians
"because I'm not bisexual,
"but anyone with eyes can see that she's got a good body."
This one, "I've got no money,
"can you give me some money for another drink?"
This one means, "As a man, he's sort of dull, rubbish.
"But in women's clothes, he's fabulous.
"She makes herself look great with gorgeous makeup,
"styles up a wig, and is one hell of a dancer."
And yeah, those were all phrases that I read
and immediately was like, oh,
yeah, I understand what that says now,
which is, yeah, really unexpected,
but very cool.
If you're a young gay person in London right now,
it probably isn't something that you have heard of
or have much experience of.
And a big reason for that is the fact that,
you know, if this is a secret language
that's just meant to keep you safe from prosecution
because being gay is illegal,
when gay becomes legal,
there's no use for the language anymore in the same way.
So, you see a decline in its usage in the '70s
up to the decriminalisation in the '60s, late '60s,
you see it not being used as much.
And another reason for this is that
it's sort of entered the mainstream,
there's no point having a secret language
if everyone knows about it.
So, there was a BBC radio kind of sketch comedy show
that used it quite heavily.
It's called Round the Horne,
it had a sketch with Julian and Sandy
and they were these two very camp, out of work actors
who used Polari in the sketch.
So, if you're gonna put it on sort of national radio
and everyone becomes familiar with it
and it becomes kind of like a funny thing
for the straight population to laugh at,
it's, you know, it's not fulfilling its original purpose.
And always traditionally,
languages might be passed down through family,
so you are brought up in a house which speaks that language
and that's the language that you hear and that you learn.
You don't really have that with the gay community
because you don't have access to that community
until you're older, until you come out.
And who would you learn it from?
There's no formalised system.
So, yeah, it just kind of faded into obscurity, really.
Although, you have seen there's some videos on YouTube
where people have done short films entirely in Polari,
which are really cool,
and I really want to look up and see
if anyone's doing any oral histories
where they record people who spoke and speak Polari
because it's one of those languages that
if it doesn't continue, it doesn't get revived,
is just gonna die off
and we don't have any writ records.
The only records we can have is people's testimonies,
so, if you know anyone who speaks Polari,
I'd be very interested to talk to them.
I also just wanted to leave you with the fact that this,
Polari is not the only kind of gay language
that sprang up, right?
Like, this language was created from a necessity
that has existed all over the world
and there's probably a lot more than this,
but I am gonna put on the screen, again,
cannot pronounce these things,
so I'm not gonna try to,
all the languages that I have found
when I've been researching
from various different cultures and languages elsewhere
that have a similar idea,
a similar cant or lexicon
specifically for the gay community.
So, yeah, I hope that was a nice little one-on-one primer
to this interesting part of queer history
that you might not know about.
If you wanna help support me make these videos,
I'm gonna leave a link to my Patreon
along with all my social media,
so you can find me all over the internet
and until I see you next time, bye.