Lau your luppers on the strillers bona

[sovay]

Much earlier today, while running errands with my mother, she asked me to define the word zhoosh. To which I said promptly, "It's from Polari, it's like to fix your hair or something." (I'm sure it's not a fossil word, but I have it packaged mentally as part of zhoosh your riah.) Apparently it was just featured on Says You!, where one bluffing panelist tried to pass it off as "an ingredient you put in a screwdriver after you've had five of them."

I have no idea why I know any Polari. It's not like it suddenly surprised me to find out, but I realized I have no memory of running across the concept for the first time. Mary Renault doesn't use it and I didn't grow up on Julian and Sandy. (Source of the subject header. I didn't come up with that on my own.) My knowledge of Morrissey is relatively recent and mostly due to lesser_celery.

I know this isn't one of the burning questions of our time, but seriously. I can remember the first time I saw the Greek alphabet written. I feel like I should at least have noticed bona to vada when it went by.

Comments

[sovay]

What little Polari I've heard came mostly from Julian and Sandy, but there's a phrase or two in the lyrics here

Thank you! I've never heard that. I seem to have exactly two songs by Gavin Friday on my computer: one is "The Last Song I'll Ever Sing" from the Baquiat soundtrack and the other is him covering "Four Whores of Baltimore."

Weird, that connection between Punch-and-Judy men and queer London.

Yeah! It probably crossed over through theater, but I don't know if it would be even possible to trace.

Going by the Wikipedia article, it interests me that I can't tell whether some Polari vocabulary assimilated into the mainstream or whether it just had a common slang ancestor/overlap with other slang that did: "barney," "basket," "bod," "blue," "butch" (and "bitch"), "camp," "clobber," "drag," "hoofer," "ogle," "scarper," "trade," and "troll" are all completely reasonable words and I know them all from other contexts. (The Yiddish is Yiddish—I think everybody knows "gelt" by now.) I've heard "khazi" for "toilet," although not from anyone I know and possibly only on television. The backslang, Italian derivations, and most of the specifically gay references stayed mostly within Polari.

I wonder if there was an equivalent for women?

I don't know. Off the top of my head I'd guess not, or at least not as codified, because queer women had a different visibility in society than men, but I'm happy to be corrected.