Jez Dolan’s Polari - an Etymology According to a Diagrammatic by Alfred H. In the 1930s it was spoken among the theater types of the West End, from which it crossed over to the city’s gay pubs, gaining its status as the secret language of gay men. “Polari is very much a working-class thing.” During the 19th- and early 20th centuries, the language was used by merchant seafarers and people who frequented the pubs around London’s docks. Historically, people who spoke Polari “were generally ‘the oppressed,’ the bottom of the rung,” says Jez Dolan, a Manchester artist whose work focuses on queer culture. Many of the words are sexual, anatomical, or euphemisms for police. ” Its vocabulary is derived from a mishmash of Italian, Romani, Yiddish, Cockney rhyming slang, backslang-as in riah to mean “hair”-and cant, a language used by 18th-century traveling performers, criminals, and carnival workers. Polari is a language of, in linguistic professor Paul Baker’s words, “ fast put-downs, ironic self-parody and theatrical exaggeration.
But recently it’s been popping up again, even appearing in the lyrics of a song on David Bowie’s final album. Following a rapid decline in the 1970s, Polari has all but disappeared.
Vada (“look at”), dolly eek (a pretty face), and chicken (a young guy) are all words from the lexicon of Polari, a secret language used by gay men in Britain at a time when homosexuality was illegal. These days, very few people know what it means to vada a chicken’s dolly eek.