Polari

I'm always fascinated by slangs and margin or traveler languages.  Today I ran across something about Polari, a slang used by queers, sailors, and showpeople, and based on Romany, thieves' cant, and other languages.

Ex.  "Oh varda that bon chicken the one with the lovely dark riah, such a handsome eek."

Yesterday I was reading prisoner memoirs from the late 1800s U.S., which are full of takes on the grafter's tongue.  Some words still in use today, others not.

Polari uses "blue" for gay, which is an interesting connection to the Russian galoboy ("blue" as gay slang for "gay"). 

There's a great scene in Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine where guys talk Polari in a flashback to the early 70s, with subtitles.  Since that movie is about "Maxwell Demon" - a Ziggy Stardust clone - as possibly an alien and definitely pointing us towards the stars, it's even a link to scifi...  Someday I will rattle on about Bowie as seminal (yes) 70s gay scifi...  Haynes captured that, as did Lev Raphael in a short story from his first collection the name of which I'm blanking on.

Apparently Polari is used in a Dr. Who episode too.  Interestingly, a linguist who wrote rather extensively about Polari also studied Internet trolls and discourse.  Talk about good use of time: 

"In this paper the concept of the "moral panic" is applied to computer-mediated communication through a qualitative examination of the case of a "troll" poster to the Usenet group alt.tv.melrose-place over a four month period. The notion of Internet identity construction is analyzed as a collaboration between participants, and the resolution strategies that the participants used in order to neutralize the moral panic are examined."