3
How to Polari Bona
It is the last year of the twentieth century and I’m in Washington, DC, to talk about the different words in Polari at the world’s only conference dedicated to language and sexuality – Lavender Linguistics. As an impoverished student I’ve been put on the cheapest route to get there from the UK – three interconnecting flights taking a total of twenty hours. When I arrive at my hotel I sleep for a day then get up and have a bit of an incident on a subway escalator when my legs won’t move. But I don’t want to think about why that’s happened, as I have worse things to worry about. It is my first ever conference talk and in the parlance of Polari, I am not feeling very bold. I don’t know anyone at the conference, and I’ve been dreading giving the talk for months. During the coffee breaks I hide in a toilet cubicle and look at my watch until the talks start again. By the day of my talk I am a nervous wreck and my shirt is soaked with sweat before I’ve even left the hotel. Thirty minutes before I am due to go on, I am checking the handouts I’ve prepared and notice an error. It’s a tiny spelling mistake. But despite this I freak out. I’ll look shoddy, like I haven’t prepared. In typical drama queen fashion, I think, ‘IT’S ALL RUINED!’ But then I remember seeing a print shop downstairs. There is still time. I can redo my handouts and get them all printed again. So I dash downstairs, queue behind students who are having their essays printed, correct the mistake, redo the handouts, pay for them, bin the old ones and race back up the stairs, just in time for my talk.
I am introduced and open my mouth. Then everything goes black and when I come round it is twenty minutes later and there is a smattering of polite applause. It’s finished but I have no recollection of what has just happened. Back in my seat, I don’t hear any of the next talk. I look down at the few remaining handouts and spot the spelling mistake. Somehow, in my panicked state, I must have thrown away the wrong set. I think, somewhere, in heaven, the long-gone Polari queens are looking down at me and thinking, ‘This! This dizzy queen is meant to be our representative on Earth! Scharda dear! Scharda!’
That’s the background to how this chapter came about. I’ll be revisiting that talk here (in less panicked circumstances), giving an overview of some of the most commonly used Polari words along with a discussion of the worldview that these words evoked and how new words were derived. The chapter acts as a Polari primer, so if you want to learn how to Polari bona, then this chapter is for you.
Finding the voice
Perhaps we should start with how Polari should sound. Many speakers had regional accents, of whom a good proportion would have had London, especially East End or Cockney, ones, as London was Polari’s spiritual home. You don’t need a Cockney accent to speak Polari, though – I interviewed speakers with strong Scouse and Glaswegian accents. And Liverpudlian Paul O’Grady, who performed as Lily Savage, knows plenty of Polari.
Speaking in a ‘posh’ upper-class or a middle-class ‘received pronunciation’ accent, sometimes thought of as standard English or what people say when they claim (incorrectly) to have ‘no accent’, isn’t great for Polari, unless you can also sound very camp. Ideally you should have a regional accent, Cockney if you can get away with it, but then overlay that with the occasional affected attempt to sound as if you’re descended from your actual royalty. Just as the word queen was used to describe men who often came from modest backgrounds, the accents of these men also had majestic pretensions. Kenneth Williams is a good role model. He grew up above his dad’s hairdresser’s shop, but in his many Carry On film roles he acted with an upper-middle-class provenance, playing a variety of haughty doctors and professors, presenting a slightly stern posh accent when trying to impress, although slipping into Cockney when highly excited. Kenneth’s Sandy exploits the Cockney accent in the Round the Horne sketches to insert more Polari into the dialogue. In a sketch called ‘Bona Homes’, where he and Julian play landscape gardeners, he opens with, ‘Oh hello Mr Horne, we’re bona ’omes you see.’ By dropping the h in homes, he is able to make the word sound more like omee, the Polari word for man.
Or listen to the recordings of Lee Sutton’s drag acts.1 Compared to Williams, who always sounds animated, Sutton has a deadpan comedic delivery – and although he’s in drag there’s scant attempt to contrive to the audience that he’s female: his voice is unapologetically gravelly. However, he sounds like he is having a good time, and that’s key to Polari. Even if your heart is breaking on the inside, you keep up the act, whether you’re in drag or out of it. A Polari queen never cried, until she got home and drew the curtains.
The ‘pseudo-posh’ bits of Polari can come across in a variety of ways. Some Polari speakers could sound quite cosmopolitan as they threw bits of classroom French (or, less frequently, German) into their conversation. While, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, Polari has a complicated history, picking up all sorts of linguistic influences over the decades, my guess is that use of French was more about showing off than there being a more substantial French connection. For the average working-class Brit in the 1950s and ’60s, holidays ‘abroad’, as the world beyond the English Channel was known, were much less common than they are now. A bit of French could imply that the speaker was a glamorous jet-setter or at least had a foreign boyfriend. However, I don’t think that most speakers were convincing anyone of this, other than the most naive chicken. Instead, use of classroom French was more parodic, based on the understanding that it is funny to pretend to be someone who thinks that speaking French is glamorous. Attempts to speak those little bits of French in an actual French accent are therefore to be frowned upon – that would be trying too hard and indicate that the speaker really knew French as opposed to be pretending to know it (although using an exaggerated French pronunciation is acceptable). Julian and Sandy regularly made use of a set of stock French phrases, including artiste, tres passé, intimé, pas de deux, entrepreneur and nouvelle vague. And one of Kenneth Williams’s party pieces was to sing a song called ‘Ma Crêpe Suzette’, which consisted of a string of unrelated French phrases that have been absorbed into English, put to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. The phrase gardy loo (meaning beware) is derived from the French garder l’eau (beware the water), originally used when the contents of a chamber pot were thrown out of a window onto the street below. Lily Savage has noted that some Polari words also have -ois added to them – such as in nanteois, none, and bevois, drink.2 This has the effect of making them appear as if they are French, introducing a further level of complexity.
Polari, when spoken naturally, can have an exaggerated intonation style. Vowel sounds can be dragged out and within longer words there can be multiple rises and falls across the different syllables. Take for example fantabulosa, which contains five syllables: fan-tab-u-los-a. If used as an exclamation, as Sandy would sometimes do, the ‘a’ sound in the syllable ‘tab’ would be extended while the following ‘u’ would have a falling intonation. Then the ‘los’ part would have an almost hysterically rising or a rise-fall intonation, along with another lengthened vowel sound, with a final, slight falling intonation on the last syllable, making the speaker appear exhausted but triumphant. But there are numerous other combinations of rises, falls or accented syllables that can be applied to fantabulosa – try enunciating it in at least three different ways, aiming for the campest intonation you can find!
Exclamations were an essential part of speaking Polari, being associated with ‘stereotypically feminine’ language, as they are reactive. If we say, ‘oh!’ or ‘really!’ or ‘fabulosa!’, we’re usually reacting to some sort of external event such as someone’s wig falling off or a claim about how many men someone danced with at last night’s ball. There have been claims by some feminist linguists that women carry out what has been memorably described as ‘shitwork’ in conversations, especially with men.3 This shitwork involves all the little things that people do to keep a conversation running smoothly – asking questions, showing that you’re listening with little ‘ohs’ and ‘ahas’, choosing topics that you know the other person will want to talk about. It’s very tiring. Men, on the other hand, aren’t meant to even acknowledge that someone else has spoken – they just stand a little away from everyone, facing the wall in a murderous sulk, or they simply bludgeon their way into an ongoing conversation, interrupting whoever is speaking to tell them they’re wrong (usually on a subject they know nothing about), or to change the subject to sport or cars or politics. If they can get a little boast in about their sexual prowess or how much money they make, then all the better. That’s the stereotype at least, and while it holds for a small number of men and women, some of the time, actually most of us are pretty versatile communicators and there are more similarities than differences between the sexes.4 Polari, then, with its exaggerated exclamations and its dears and duckies and empty adjectives (bona!), feels like a hyper-realized version of stereotypical women’s speech – a parody of how women talk taken to a hilarious extreme – a linguistic form of drag.
There are different ways to speak Polari, then, linking through to personas – the piss-elegant posh queen, the world-weary seen-it-all tired old queen, the excited, breathless young queen, the witty, caustic queen, the gossipy queen who knows everyone’s business. Each would use a different set of intonational patterns for different effects.
The social whirl
Polari is about drama and Polari speakers were drama queens par excellence. Another feminine stereotype – gossip – is meat and drink to Polari. Polari was essentially a social language, and many speakers lived in densely packed urban areas and had numerous friends, acquaintances, lovers, one-night-stands, exes, crushes, stalkers, rivals, enemies and frenemies. They also had a perfect recollection not only of all of their current relationships but of the status of the relationships of all of the other people that they knew, and social occasions would be spent updating one another on these relationships in great detail. As a young and introverted man on the gay scene, I often found this volume of gossip to be dizzying and overwhelming. I’d sit in the living rooms of some new friend who’d invited me round and then three or four of his other, more long-standing friends would arrive and there they’d sit all afternoon, drinking cups of tea and talking about all the people they knew, with me a sullen presence in the corner, to the point where I was sure they were simply making up names – nobody could know that many people! There couldn’t be that many people in existence! Gossip is one of a queen’s weapons – you never know when it’ll come in handy, and much of it is, of course, geared towards the possibility of having sex with someone at some later date. Keeping track of who has split up with who, who is rumoured to have been seen down the cottage, who made a clumsy pass at who, whose wig fell off on the dance floor – these are all matters of state importance to Polari speakers.
The large number of words that relate to people indicates the importance of gossip in the Polari speaker’s world. As we’ve seen, the generic term for man, usually a heterosexual man, was omee (also omi or homi), while a woman was a palone (sometimes pronounced to rhyme with omee as paloney, sometimes not). A gay man was named by combining the Polari words for man and woman together into omee-palone, whereas a lesbian was the reverse order – palone-omee. There’s a conflation of gender and sexuality here which from some later perspectives might be seen as problematic – to say that a gay man is literally a man-woman keys into negative stereotypes about gay men as effeminate or women trapped in men’s bodies. This was the general thinking of the time, so it is hardly surprising that these ideas found their way into the Polari mindset. However, many Polari speakers were very camp and a good number were what people might nowadays call gender-creative. They dressed in women’s clothes – either by dragging up as female impersonators, or in a relatively more low-key way, by dyeing hair, wearing a touch of make-up or accessorizing with a colourful scarf. These speakers enjoyed the aspects of their identity that were feminine and felt that they were being true to themselves when they expressed them – they may have looked and sounded like camp stereotypes but most of them didn’t view themselves or people like them negatively. Accordingly, queen keyed in to the imaginary world of Polari speakers as (female) royalty. If you are going to emulate a woman, why not be the most powerful woman in the country?
In 1981, a documentary called Lol: A Bona Queen of Fabularity was broadcast on BBC2. Starring London drag queen Lorri Lee, the documentary cuts between Lorri’s drag act at a hen night, hoovering her flat and reconstructions of her younger days coming out of national service and joining the Merchant Navy (with Lorri playing her younger self in flashbacks). Lorri waxed lyrical on the word queen, providing a lesson in the different sub-classifications:
Well what is a queen? Well you’ve met one, that’s the drag queen, that’s me . . . There’s also the camp queen, that everyone sees in the street . . . you know, ‘alright duck’, that type of queen . . . There’s what you call a black market queen. Now that’s the type of queen that an ordinary everyday person, and even me, could look at it, and you’d never suss that it was a queen in a million years, but they’re the types, I don’t really admire terribly . . . that usually sort of creep up on people and then strike, you know, sort of lull them into a false sense of security and then strike, and I think they’re the ones that usually get smacked in the face because of it. But then . . . you’ve got your blob type queen, this a queen of no account, you know, she’s a little dumpy queen, walks around, usually follows a drag queen and sort of hangs on to every word it says, hoping a bit of the glitter’s going to fall off on her and one day she’s going to wake up like Prince Charming, suddenly turn into something different . . . After that you’ve got . . . your cottage queens. Now a cottage queen is a queen that would get her trade from a cottage naturally . . . it means a man’s toilet. And I know queens . . . couldn’t pass a cottage dear, would have to go in, some would even take sandwiches and a flask, would spend a pleasant day.5
In the Polari speaker’s world, gender was linguistically reversed – he was she and (less commonly) she became he. This practice of feminizing through language, referred to by artist and Sister of Perpetual Indulgence (Manchester branch) Jez Dolan, is referred to as ‘she-ing’. She-ing is one of the aspects of Polari that has survived into more recent decades, and the practice was so pervasive at a particular bar on Canal Street in Manchester’s Gay Village that a ‘She-box’ was installed a few years ago, akin to a ‘Swear-box’, where patrons would have to put in a few coins if they she’d someone, with the proceeds being donated to charity.
In the Julian and Sandy sketches, she is occasionally used to refer to the (male) partner of a (butch) man. In the following exchange, from ‘Bona Bijou Tourettes’, the pair refer to their friend Gordon, who wears leather and rides a motorbike, bearing some of the identity markers of rough trade (discussed later in this chapter). Julian and Sandy discuss how Gordon had set himself up with a bar in Tangiers, although the venture has recently fallen through:
Julian: She walked out on him.
Sandy: Oh, that old American boiler.
Julian: Yes.
Sandy: Oh.
Julian: She moved on.
Sandy: Mm, Mm. I thought she would.
Mr Horne: Look, erm.
Sandy: I could tell you a thing or two there.
Mr Horne: Yes, er, now look.
Sandy: Make your hair curl. Don’t you talk to me ducky.6
As there are enough clues regarding Gordon’s sexuality elsewhere in the sketches, we can interpret she as referring to a male partner.
Hypothetically, almost everything can be referred to as she, including oneself. Polari speakers would routinely call one another she – normally in an affectionate, sisterly way, although if they knew that the person being spoken to didn’t identify as a queen, there would be a more confrontational aspect to the pronoun. She effectively drags up the most masculine of men, without the need for a trip to the make-up counter at Selfridges, and it also acts as an insinuation that the man being talked about may not be as fully masculine or heterosexual as he presents himself to be. To an extent this may have been wishful thinking – for many Polari speakers the ideal partner would be a butch man who did not identify as gay, the Great Dark Man of Quentin Crisp’s fantasies. However, there was also a more spiteful side to ‘she-ing’ – the Polari speakers would have known that such men would have found the use of feminine pronouns on them to have been very insulting, so to use them was a way of taking them down a peg or two. This explains the large number of feminizing terms for the police, who were rightly seen as natural enemies: Betty Bracelets, Hilda Handcuffs, Jennifer Justice, orderly daughters, Lily Law. These terms indicated that Polari speakers were able to turn a threat into a joke, with the added advantage that they could act as coded warnings – uttering ‘Betty Bracelets!’ at the local cottage would have the effect of sending queens scattering in all directions.
The gender politics behind the feminizing pronouns are complicated. When gay men use she on themselves and their friends, are they parodying women in a way that borders on offensive? Are they simply complicit in their own oppression by adopting language and labels that are used in homophobic ways, and then using that oppressive language on their enemies, knowing it will hurt them even more? Am I over-thinking it? Polari speakers simultaneously reclaimed and weaponized she. We could argue that they were a product of their time, but after decades of Gay Liberation, she is still used by (some) gay men. I like to think of it as an affectionate word – and if it was used to hurt, then it was more about the drag queen’s uncanny ability to find a person’s weakness rather than saying anything about the speaker’s own politics.
Another pronoun, perhaps even more problematic from later perspectives, was it – which Lorri Lee uses three times in her discussion of queens quoted earlier. It was sometimes used to refer to a one-off anonymous sexual partner – signifying a form of objectification which can appear dismissive, even callous. Consider the following, from Kenneth Williams’s diary:
I met Harry who said Tom picked up a boy in the Piano and Harry said ‘It’s got a huge cock so Tom is silly, with that pile and all . . .’ so I thought hallo! It certainly gets around in Tangier.7
To an extent such partners appear to be reduced to their physical body parts. As mentioned, another term for a sexual partner was trade, which had a range of slightly overlapping meanings. It could refer to a potential, past or current sexual partner, and usually indicated a temporary sexual relationship, sometimes a one-off. Trade sometimes, but not always, indicated a masculine man who might not have identified as gay and would have been likely to have taken the ‘inserter’ role in sex. Such men who were classed as trade did not usually speak Polari and probably would not have identified as trade or talked much about their sexuality.
Trade could also literally refer to a male prostitute, or to someone who would occasionally take money for sex but might not typically be viewed as a male prostitute – sailors on shore leave, for example, or Guardsmen who traditionally cruised parks looking for well-off men. Money might exchange hands; it might not. Sometimes the money would have been nominal, a way for the trade to establish his masculine, normally heterosexual credentials. This was in a time when some men felt that they had to engage in elaborate excuses to justify having sex with one another. However, trade could also be a station on the way towards a more established gay identity. Gardiner notes the aphorism ‘today’s trade is tomorrow’s competition’, which indicates a downside to the endless hunt for new partners in a finite context.8 Internalized homophobia or just plain nastiness might make the trade attack their sexual partner or demand money from them, hence the term rough trade, although this term could also refer more generally to working-class casual male partners. Quentin Crisp, despite being a camp gay man, did not really use Polari in his autobiographies, although in the televized dramatization of The Naked Civil Servant he does refer to roughs – aggressively masculine working-class men who disguised their attraction to other men through harassment: ‘Some roughs are really queer and some queers are really rough.’9 And Lee Sutton cracks, ‘I’ve been feeling a little rough all day,’ in his drag act.10
Another way of referring to people was to use terms like ducky, dear, heartface, girl or treash (a shortening of treasure), which often acted as a kind of full stop at the end of every utterance. One of my interviewees, Lucas, explained why these terms of endearment were so common:
I myself use sweetie a lot because it is very convenient if you don’t remember the other person’s name, a very frequent occurrence on the gay scene. Older people use dear for that reason, as well as its camp value.
With the large cast of characters passing through the Polari speaker’s world, it is perhaps understandable that there would be occasional memory lapses, so simply using a generic and feminizing term of endearment for everyone is safer than getting a name wrong, but also helps to contribute towards the speaker’s own feminine performance. With that said, a couple of the men I interviewed noted that these words could also have a sting. To call someone heartface, if they are not attractive, would be rather cutting, while dear can appear somewhat patronizing or dismissive. And if everyone is called by the same term then the effect is to diminish the importance of individual relationships. You are signifying ‘I can’t be bothered to learn your name’, so there is a slight put-down behind these seemingly affectionate terms, if used in certain contexts. However, there’s potentially an additional level of meaning behind all of the implied rudeness in Polari – a sense of playfulness or parody, of not really meaning it. The Polari speaker who calls everyone dear may only want to appear a bit dismissive and forgetful – she is doing it because she feels close enough to you to know you’ll take the joke in the right spirit. It’s a shared joke, rather than a joke at your expense. The worst thing you can do with a Polari speaker is to take her seriously. In other words, we should bear in mind the importance of not being earnest.
Perhaps a kinder set of words are those based on family metaphors – an auntie or mother indicates an older gay male, usually a friend or mentor where there is no sexual relationship. On the other hand, the term sisters indicates two gay men of usually similar age, who have probably previously had sexual relations, but the initial physical attraction has given way to a more companionable situation.
Another important aspect of Polari was the assignation of a camp name, or a christening. Such names were given to you by other queens; you were not supposed to pick one for yourself. They thus marked your camp identity and acceptance into the gay subculture. Your camp name could be merely arbitrary, but in many cases it would reflect an aspect of your provenance, personality, physical appearance or sexual behaviour, although as with other aspects of Polari, while given affectionately, there could be an element of sarcasm attached to it – a little sting designed to take an arrogant queen down a peg or two. So a very attractive queen might be given a dowdy name like Mavis. Lorri Lee describes the process:
Being young queens, everybody had camp names, what we called other names, mostly girl’s names. So Crystal, who’s name isn’t Crystal – I said to her, you must be called Crystal Spring and she said ‘Yes, I will be.’ In those days, I was very partial to sailors, who we referred to as seaweed. So I got the name of Lorelei, a rock in the river Rhine, which is reputed to give out vibrations luring sailors to their doom. At sea the boys couldn’t get their tongue round the name so they used to call me Lol or Lola or Lolly, anything.11
Martin, a steward I interviewed who worked on cruise liners, describes some of the sea queens that he knew and how they received their names.
You had Prissie – she was a prissy queen; Mother, who was one of the older queens – she was like a mother hen with all her young chicken queens who confided in her; Olga, because her grandmother was Russian; Lana Turner, who always wore sweaters and dyed her hair peroxide to convince us that she was a natural blonde; Mata Hari, who was always snooping around at night looking for trade; Poppy, who used ‘Californian Poppy’ perfume by the gallon; Molly Brown, who got torpedoed in the war and still survives to tell the tale. Some of them, I didn’t know their real names.
There is less evidence that gay women referred to each other by camp names, although in the 1964 play The Killing of Sister George (filmed in 1968 with Beryl Reid in the title role), the soap opera actress June Buckridge is widely referred to as George, based on the nickname of the character she plays in the fictional soap opera Applehurst.
Sexuality, gender and sexual availability and desirability were all important ways in which individuals were categorized, with numerous Polari words given over to this task and some words referencing multiple categories. Manly Alice describes a gay man who is also masculine, whereas Zelda is a woman who is also unattractive. The abbreviation TBH (to be had) functions in a similar way to trade, in that it has multiple meanings. If someone is TBH then they are sexually available (that is, willing to engage in gay sex), and/or worth having (in other words, physically attractive). As Michael Davidson wrote in 1962:
The word ‘queer’ then hadn’t been invented; the cryptic designation was ‘so’, corresponding comme ça in Montparnasse. ‘Oh, is he so?’ one would ask, giving a slight italic tone to the syllable. Another verbal cipher in use was the initials t.b.h. ‘My dear,’ someone might say standing outside Wellington Barracks, ‘the one third from the right in the front rank – I know he’s t.b.h!’ – meaning ‘to be had’; as the modern queer will say ‘he’s trade’.12
An extension of the abbreviation, NTBH, means someone who is not to be had – for example, hopelessly heterosexual or simply ugly. Related to NTBH is naff, possibly derived from another acronym, although with many differing origin stories, it is difficult to confidently pinpoint where it came from. Perhaps the most satisfying explanation is that it stands for ‘not available for fucking’, although this could be a backronym – whereby a meaningful phrase is found to spell out the individual letters at a later stage of the word’s development.
Naff was used to refer to heterosexual people generally and could be either an adjective or a noun – ‘Don’t waste your time on her, she’s naff!’ or ‘Awful – the place was full of naffs!’ Naff therefore also has the overlapping meanings attributed to NTBH – someone who is either unavailable (owing to the unfortunate condition of being straight) or not worth pursuing, or a mixture of the two. It is a word with an amusing later development, as it was one of the few core Polari words to cross over into mainstream slang. Naff was regularly used by characters in the 1970s prison sitcom Porridge to mean something bad, especially in the phrase naff off, which stood for a softened version of fuck off. The word gained notoriety in 1982 when it was reportedly used by Princess Anne, who fell off her horse during the Badminton Horse Trials and told photographers to ‘Naff off.’ Once a swear word has been embraced by real royalty, it inevitably loses some of its lustre and naff diminished in use from the 1980s onwards. However, we can perhaps take a certain amount of gratification from the fact that it was naffs who adopted the word naff themselves, not realizing that they were the original target of it, and that by the time they were using the word themselves, this was simply a marker of how naff they were.
There is a proliferation of classificatory words that relate to camp mannerisms – outrageous, screaming, nelly, dizzy, swishing and bitchy, which are likely to have had subtle distinctions between them, as opposed to being merely synonymous. Related to these words was bold – a favourite of Julian and Sandy, who would instantly label any sexually suspicious behaviour of Mr Horne with ‘Ooh, in’e bold!’ To be bold was to be fairly open and/or obvious about one’s sexuality, and considering the taboos and dangers associated with this state, this really was an act of boldness. Despite the fact that Polari enabled secrecy, many Polari speakers were bold queens in reality. A bold queen does not mind that she will be identified as a queen. In fact, this queen wants to be identified as a queen and would be rather upset if nobody noticed her. This is a queen who is used to being the centre of attention. She sees herself as Scarlett O’Hara, surrounded by eager suitors hanging on her every word. The bold queen will be dressed as a bold queen, in eye-catching colours and patterns, clothes that are a little too tight in places, a little too fashionable, a little too daring. Her hair will have been worked on in some way – dyed, gelled, teased up or forward to hide any unfortunate balding areas – and she is likely to be wearing make-up. Her goal is to signify that she is gay and available – and to attract the attention of the most masculine, handsome man she can find. Her voice will be a little louder than everyone else’s, her walk exaggerated, her mannerisms larger and more affected.
Moving on to a related use of Polari, we find a class of nouns that refer to body parts, which comprise around one in five of all Polari nouns. These enabled Polari speakers to refer to themselves and one another in a more technical way. About a third of the body words relate to the face, with another third referring to sexual organs. There were about equal numbers for male and female organs, although we might want to bear in mind that gender switching could be used to apply to sexual organs in the same way that it was used on pronouns. So a man might be referred to as possessing a minge (vagina) or might even be given the nickname Minge. The relatively high number of sexual body words indicates an explicit aspect to Polari that did not appear very often in the Julian and Sandy sketches (although see the discussion of dish later). Dish (bum) implies a food metaphor that was present in other words – beef curtains (vagina), brandy (backside), meat and two veg (penis and testicles), minces (eyes), pots in the cupboard (teeth), plates (feet), winkle (small penis). Similarly, a young man was a chicken – a term that was sometimes used on me when I went on the gay scene in the 1990s. I was told very markedly that you were a chicken only until you were 25, this age magically representing a kind of cut-off of desirability, with thirty being the next cut-off (and simply meaning ‘old’). Sex is likened to a tasty meal in the Polari speaker’s worldview, although this is not unique to gay men – similar food metaphors are found in slang used by heterosexual people (for example, referring to a woman as crumpet).
Clothing words comprised around 15 per cent of Polari nouns, with again around equal amounts of words to refer to male and female clothing and many of them relating to accessories like jewellery (groinage) and spectacles (ogale fakes) or hats (cappella), wigs (sheitel) and shoes (batts – pronounced bates). Clothing itself was simply drag but could also be clobber.
A significant number of Polari verbs refer to sexual acts – charver/charva and its clipped spelling arva refer to penetrative (vaginal or anal) sex, and there are a number of other words which specifically denote oral sex (gamming, blowjob, plating, reef, tip the velvet, jarry, nosh), many which are synonymous with the concept of eating. We should note that plate could refer to both feet and oral sex. Drag performer Lee Sutton makes the following joke in one of her acts, describing how she was an apprentice for a photographer’s assistant:
The first day he took me into the darkroom, just to get the feel of things. The second day he taught me how to touch up and develop. The third day he showed me how to make a good enlargement. We started off with postcard size and ended up with whole plates.
On the recording I have, the word plates produces audience laughter, indicating that the ruder Polari meaning was recognized.13
Verbs could be conjugated in pretty much the same way as English verbs. So varda or vada, which meant look, can have the forms vadaed (looked), vadas (looks) and vadaring (looking). Applying a little creativity results in bona vadering (good looking). While vada generally refers to the acting of looking (and can be used as a directive – vada the omee ajax), there were other verbs that referred more specifically to the practice of looking for sexual partners, cruise, troll, cold calling, and two that were taken parodically from legal language, solicit and importune.
Other categories of verbs relate to performance – as we’ve seen, to wallop is to dance, for example, and again we can apply English grammatical rules to derive other forms – a dancer becomes a walloper. Many words that were nouns could also be verbs without modifying them. So while a bat(t) was a shoe it could also refer to shuffling or dancing on stage. Similarly, a bevvy was a drink but it could also mean to drink or could be modified as bevvvied to refer to being drunk. In the same way, to be charvaed (fucked) meant to be exhausted.
Clothing and dressing-up verbs could also be linked to the more performative, theatrical aspect of Polari or could be due to the fact that gay men paid attention to their physical appearance in order to attract partners, with both actors and gay men likely to talk of dragging up, putting on the eke or zhooshing the riah.
Some words refer more to social interaction, with polari itself not only standing for the language itself but functioning as a verb which meant to say or speak. Bitch (in the verb sense) referred to complaining or criticizing someone, and there are other words or idioms which indicate interactions: mogue (to tell a lie), do the rights (seek revenge), turn my oyster up (make me laugh). Some verbs indicate conflict, violence or crime: barney, battery, battyfang, schonk, sharper. These words perhaps remind us how dangerous it could be to be gay in the twentieth century. Finally, a collection of miscellaneous verbs suggest more wide-ranging activities and can be applied to a range of contexts: order(ly) (go, come), screeve (write), savvy (know), parker (give), lau (put/place) and dhobie (wash).
A little Polari goes a long way
The next most important class of Polari words comprised different types of modifiers, many of which were adjectives, which are used to describe nouns, although some adjectives could just as easily function as adverbs. Probably the most well-known adjective is bona (occurring very frequently in the Julian and Sandy sketches as part of the opening line how bona to vada your dolly old eek again). However, it also works as an adverb in phrases like order lau your luppers on the strillers bona where bona means ‘to do well’.
Many of the Polari adjectives are evaluative in some way, rather than neutral, conveying the speaker’s opinion (positive or negative) towards what they are talking about. Polari is a highly critical language, again often relating to questions regarding the sexual availability or desirability of people. Some Polari terms were superlatives: too much, gutless, large, mental – and these could be used to refer to something as extremely good or bad, with context needing to be taken into account for the interpretation. If someone’s riah is described as too much it is being marked as worthy of attention but it may be lovely or awful.
Words relating to quantities or gradations played a particularly important role, as they could be combined with other words in order to create new meanings. Two especially useful words were nanti, which functioned as general negator and could be variously used to mean none, no, not, nothing or don’t, and dowry, which meant many, a lot of or very. Nanti could be used to signify that there was nothing of something: for example, nanti handbag or nanti dinarly meant I’ve got no money, and nanti kip meant I’ve had no sleep. Nanti could also be used with a verb to act as an imperative to the listener. Nanti Polari, Lily! means don’t say anything, the police are nearby. Other, less immediately obvious uses of nanti were nanti that, meaning don’t worry about it or forget about it, and nanti worster, meaning I’m no worse or not bad, when someone asked you how you were doing. When combined with the preposition ajax (which meant nearby, from the word adjacent), nanti ajax stood for far away. Lee Sutton used nanti even more creatively in his Union Tavern act, immortalized in his A Near Miss LP:
Are you aware of personal freshness? Or do your mates all call you pongo? If so use nanti poo and show them you’re not to be sniffed at.
Here nanti poo translates to ‘no poo’ or ‘no smell’, with Sutton taking advantage of its similarity to the word shampoo – where nanti replaces sham. Similarly, dowry could be combined with various nouns to signify something that was the biggest, best or ultimate of that class. A dowry lattie was a palace, a dowry aqua was a flood and a king was the dowriest omee. The basics of Polari are pretty easy to pick up – there is a limited vocabulary that shouldn’t take too long to learn – but these queens made the most of what they had, just like Maria in The Sound of Music making new outfits out of curtains. If a word didn’t exist, they’d see if an existing one could be altered in some way and if that didn’t work, then they’d marry up two words to imply the meaning. Learning new ways to employ old words is one of the pleasures of engaging with Polari – and in the workshops I teach, there is always a nice ‘aha!’ moment when the class learn that they can combine terms to make new concepts like dowry lattie or nanti ajax.
The combination of the basic numbers is another way in which people realize that they actually know a lot more Polari than they thought they did. My workshops usually begin with me getting students to say the numbers one to ten (una, dooey, tray, quattro, chinker, say, setter, otter, nobber and daiture) as well as half (medza) and a hundred (chenter). Knowing just these few words allows us access to much larger numbers: fifty, for example, is chinker daiture, while seven hundred is setter chenter. Thus the number 956 becomes nobber chenter chinker daiture say.
This versatility on behalf of the speakers potentially means that old words can be adapted to refer to new contexts. The noun vacaya, which refers to something that makes a noise, can be used to refer to a mobile phone, indicating that later Polari speakers appear to have invented new terms as other technologies came along – the telephone is known as the polari pipes whereas television is vadavision. Both words employ a form of alliteration that has been seen elsewhere in terms like Betty Bracelets or Lily Law.
Other ways of compounding words to make new ones involve terms like queen, omee, fake, covers and cheat. We have already seen how queen could be modified to refer to different types of gay men (cottage queen, drag queen) and in a similar way omee could be paired with other words to suggest professions – strillers omee (musician), butch omee (soldier), charpering omee (policeman), joggering omee (entertainer). Fake, while having a noun meaning (as an erection) and a verb meaning (to make something), also had a modifying use where it could be attached to other words, often to signify clothing or accessories. Fake ogles were spectacles while a fake riah was a wig. Goolie ogle fakes (literally black eye fakes) were sunglasses and aunt nelly fakes were earrings. In a similar way, covers could be used in order to refer to different types of clothing with lally covers being trousers and mart covers being gloves.
Cheat plays a particularly interesting role in Polari, coming from Cant and acting as a kind of dummy noun for ‘thing that . . .’. It can therefore be combined with a variety of verbs to create new nouns, as in the phrase given in the last chapter: hearing cheat, to mean an ear (a thing that hears). Animals also featured in Cant using cheat, such as bleating cheat (sheep), quacking cheat (duck), cackling cheat (fowl). Polari speakers, particularly some of those linked with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, incorporated aspects of Cant into their Polari, updating some of the old words to have slightly new meanings to reflect twentieth-century objects. For example, a trundling cheat initially referred to a cart or carriage, but in Polari it would refer to a taxi or car.
The process of referring to a noun via some aspect of its nature is called synecdoche and is found in a few other Polari words like smellies (perfume), glossies (magazines), timepiece (watch) and remould (sex reassignment surgery), with the process potentially enabling the creation of new Polari words as required.
We have already seen how -ois can be added onto the end of an existing Polari or English word in order to make it appear as if it were derived from French, making the speaker appear more multilingual than they are. However, another suffix, -ette, not only signifies that a word is Polari but creates new meanings. Putting -ette at the end of a word both feminizes and reduces the implied size of something: for example, an usherette is a female usher, whereas a kitchenette is a small kitchen. Julian and Sandy used the -ette suffix to camp effect, with some of the titles of their businesses incorporating this form: Guided Trippettes, Bona Song Publisherettes and Bona Bijou Tourettes. Their use of -ette usually implied something small, as it was paired with words like bijou, tiny or mini (bijou treashette, a tiny drinkette, a mini glassette). However, as with a lot of Polari, there’s a seam of irony running through the discourse, and a mini glassette of Chablis could actually refer to an enormous glass of wine, held by someone who likes their drink but wants to humorously downplay the fact.
Does Polari have a grammar?
Grammar is the system of rules in a language which help to determine the order in which words occur in order to make sense and how different tenses like past, present and future are marked. Has something happened, is it currently happening or is it going to happen at some point? It is also grammar that lets us distinguish between who takes on the active role in a sentence (the doer) and who is the person having something done to them (something which is often of great interest to Polari speakers!). Without grammar a language is just a list of words and that won’t get us very far.
Up to this point we have considered the types of words in Polari and how new words can be created or old words can be combined to make new ones. However, we have not considered in much detail the way that multiple Polari words can be strung together to create a meaningful spoken utterance or a written sentence. There do exist a number of idiomatic phrases within Polari that tend to work as fixed expressions and express a certain meaning, which sometimes cannot be literally translated word for word. These are often euphemisms that make use of English words, such as what’s the colour of his eyes? (how big is his penis?), don’t be strange (don’t hold back or goodbye), that’s your actual French (I’ve just spoken some French, aren’t I sophisticated!), in the life and on the team (both meaning to be gay). Other idiomatic phrases can incorporate a mixture of English and Polari: for example, nanti pots in the cupboard means no teeth, while scharda there’s nada to vada in the larder means it’s a shame he has a small penis.
However, these idiomatic uses tend to have a single meaning, so function more like a single word rather than a bona fide combination of words. In order to think about the grammatical aspects of Polari, then, we initially need to consider three important grammatical categories or sets of words that I’ve mentioned so far in this chapter – these are nouns (words that name things), verbs (words for doing things) and adjectives (words for describing things). I’ve noted already how we can apply English derivational rules to Polari words in order to create different forms of a base word. So if lally is leg we can apply the normal rules of pluralization to form lallies – legs. The same applies to verbs – so as well as vada (look) we can have vadas (looks), vadared (looked) and vadaring (looking) – and adjectives – naff (bad) can be extended to naffer (more naff) or naffest (the most naff). Additionally, adverbs can be derived from adjectives, so if I say, ‘he took his part bona’, the word bona functions as an adverb to mean ‘well’, as opposed to its more typical adjectival meaning (which is ‘good’).
If we simply focus on the nouns, verbs and adjectives but keep everything else in English, we can go a long way. Julian and Sandy made use of this ‘basic’ form of Polari in phrases like ‘scotches may be naff but his plates are bona’.14 We could swap out the Polari for the English equivalents and very easily glean the meaning ‘legs may be unattractive but his feet are nice’. Julian’s sentence here is missing the initial ‘his’, but this is implied. While Polari has a reasonably good coverage of nouns, verbs and adjectives – grammatical categories that are sometimes called ‘open-class’ because we can go on inventing new words to put in them – it hasn’t really developed equivalents for what are called the closed-class grammatical categories, a much smaller set of words incorporating prepositions (such as by, of, in), conjunctions (and, or), determiners (that, a, the), auxiliary verbs (be, do, have) and modal verbs (could, can, would). These grammatical categories are called closed-class because we generally can’t invent new conjunctions or prepositions in the same way that we can create new nouns or verbs. Indeed, ajax (next to) and nanti ajax (far away) are two rare cases of Polari prepositions.
So some Polari speakers simply use the English closed-class words, as in ‘scotches may be naff but his plates are bona’. However, another option is to miss a few of them (but not too many) out. If this can be done without completely obscuring the meaning of the utterance, then it can work. Take the phrase ‘palone vadas omee-palone very cod’.15 A word-for-word translation of this – ‘woman looks gay man very bad’ – is ambiguous because the closed-class words are missing. If we knew more about the context that the utterance was made in, we could probably start to piece it together, though. In this case, imagine it is being said by one Polari speaker to another and they are in a cafe with a rather frosty-faced woman sitting at a nearby table, close enough to hear their conversation. If we know that there are no other gay men around, then we can deduce that omee-palone is being used to refer to the speaker himself – he’s describing himself as a gay man rather than using the first person pronoun me. This enables us to have another go at translating: ‘woman looks me very bad’. And now we can start to guess at what the missing closed-class grammatical words would be: ‘That woman looks at me very bad.’ This still doesn’t sound like a well-formed English sentence though, so we’d need to engage in a little glossing in order to reach the final translation: ‘That woman is giving me dirty looks.’
Paul O’Grady is one of the last connections to the drag acts who used Polari, and one of the few queens who broke into the mainstream, becoming a much-loved household name. In Lily Savage: A Sort of A to Z Thing, O’Grady gives a few examples of Polari sentences, some of which mirror the simple type of Polari used by Julian and Sandy and can be reasonably easily translated.16 These include ‘varda the naff hommie with nante pots in the cupboard’ (look at this unsightly wretch with the appalling dentistry) and ‘get that bona jarrie down the screech’ (eat this wonderful food). However, a couple of Lily’s other Polari phrases require a little more guesswork. Lily writes that ‘naff feeley hommie’ (which literally means awful young man) translates to ‘I’m very jealous of that young man’. Here, as with the palone giving the cod vada above, context is important. Another example of Lily’s is ‘palare the antique h. for the bevois’. The literal translation is ‘talk the old man for the drink’. Once we make an educated guess at the missing grammatical words we have ‘talk to the old man for the drink’ and a final gloss gets us to ‘If you engage our elderly friend in conversation he might stand a round of drinks’. So while some Polari phrases when written down and presented out of context are difficult to follow, we need to bear in mind that this is not the way that Polari was ordinarily used. The speakers would be taking their immediate surroundings into account and this would have aided translation considerably. In a BBC interview broadcast in 2017, O’Grady reminisced about Polari, describing being in a taxi with a friend who was an adept Polari speaker.17 The friend elbows him and says, ‘Nanti Polari, omee aunt nellying.’ Again, a word-for-word gloss would be ‘Don’t speak, man listening’, but O’Grady translates it as ‘Don’t speak, the driver is listening’.
Lily Savage (Paul O’Grady): ‘I know it’s a cliché, but I didn’t want to work in an office’
Another point of note about Polari’s grammar is that there is evidence that it borrowed from French on occasion. Consider the following quote from one of the Summer’s Out Polari sketches: ‘Vada well: zhooshed riah, the shyckle mauve, full slap, rouge for days, fake ogle-riahs, fortuni cocktail frock and mother’s fabest slingbacks.’18
The part of this sketch I’m most interested in is ‘the shyckle mauve’ which translates word-for-word to ‘the wig mauve’. This word order (putting an adjective after a noun) is not typical of English but is more commonly found in French. The speaker in this sketch also uses French phrases like mais oui and la tout ensemble, employing occasional idiomatic French as a way of projecting a pseudo-sophisticated identity, so the word order of shyckle mauve also suggests an adoption of a French grammatical convention, indicating a way that Polari grammar could sometimes differ from the expectations of English grammar.
Polari certainly does have the makings of a grammar, then, although depending on the complexity of its use, it either adopted the rules of English grammar or developed a grammar that was highly dependent on open-class lexical grammatical categories, requiring hearers to rely heavily on context in order to make sense of utterances. The elision of the closed-class grammatical categories has the effect of making Polari utterances rather reminiscent of telegraph messages. As the cost of such messages was often calculated by the number of words, people tended to remove small words like conjunctions and prepositions since they could often be inferred due to the context. For most speakers, Polari did not have a unique grammar, then, which makes it wholly different from English, although its telegraphic nature did start to approach a form of grammar and some speakers combined words in unusual ways, making it difficult to decipher utterances if the contextual aspects were not present.
In covering some of the most commonly used types of words in Polari, we can start to get a better idea of the kinds of topics that typical speakers were interested in – with the high number of words for people, clothing and everyday objects indicating that this is a social language. This, coupled with the words for sexual body parts, sexual identities and sexual acts, also points to another aspect – a form of language for talking about sex and sexuality, especially gay sexuality. However, as we have seen, focusing on the words themselves can only take us so far. Polari is highly dependent on context for meaning, and without knowing more about the context we may make inaccurate interpretations. The following chapter moves away from the nuts and bolts of the language itself to consider social context – asking under what circumstances and with what motivations Polari was spoken.