In discussing the German low-life cant called Rotwelsch, Mark Glanville (Books, 9 January) referred in passing to Polari, ‘the language of gay English subculture’, being used ‘by members of a marginalised group to converse without being understood by outsiders’.
I’ve never been convinced by this description of Polari. Undercover policemen in Soho before 1967 may not have been the sharpest knives in the drawer, but they did share the speech of those among whom they moved. Polari, or Parlyare, was a loosely coherent slang drawing on Italian, Yiddish, back slang, rhyming slang and perhaps Romany. This slang vocabulary was familiar to fairground people, publicans, criminals, theatre folk and the homosexuals among them.
Polari had no syntax of its own, just a limited lexicon. Its identification with homosexuals was cemented by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams as Julian and Sandy on Round the Horne, on BBC radio 1965-8, either side of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts.
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