Julian, or possibly Sandy, in Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) or Round the Horne (1965–68), would say: ‘Oh, Mr ’orne, how bona to vada your jolly old eek.’ I was reminded of them when leafing through Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (A&C Black, £9.99), an up-to-date pocket-format book less trying to the wrist joints to read in bed than Jonathon Green’s 1,300-page Dictionary of Slang.
Julian, or possibly Sandy, in Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) or Round the Horne (1965–68), would say: ‘Oh, Mr ’orne, how bona to vada your jolly old eek.’ I was reminded of them when leafing through Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (A&C Black, £9.99), an up-to-date pocket-format book less trying to the wrist joints to read in bed than Jonathon Green’s 1,300-page Dictionary of Slang.
Julian and Sandy were using Parlyaree (in the last decade or so more widely known at Polari). In origin chiefly 19th-century, it uses mainly mashed up Italian words. It is hard to think anyone knows more than 100 words of Parlyaree. No one ever spoke it. They used its words, along with rhyming slang, back-slang and vogue slang-terms to produce an ‘in’ cant.
There is the tiresome fantasy of self-styled ‘queer’ linguisticians that Polari was a secret language among oppressed homosexuals before decriminalisation in 1967. Anyone old enough to remember Soho before that date knows that such habits of speech were flags, not camouflage, of a homosexual subculture, or were used, like other forms of slang, jocularly.
Much nonsense is written about Parlyaree. I’m sorry to say that someone called Paul Baker, who has published not one but two books on the subject, has claimed that the Parlyaree word naff is an acronym of Not Available For Fucking.
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