Your Brain on Facts. Moxie LaBouche

Glitch is also Yiddish, though it originally meant a slip-up. Before we leave the Yiddishkeit, let’s look at the intro to the classic TV show Laverne & Shirley, “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!” A schlemiel is a fool. Schlimazel means a quarrel or a fight. Hasenpfeffer is not Yiddish; it’s a type of German stew, usually made with rabbit.

      Fantabulosa

      Another fascinating language added to our lexicon isn’t technically a language. Polari is a cant, a cryptolect, also sometimes called an anti-language, a system of slang based on the speaker’s native language, used only by a select group. For gay men in Britain before 1967, Polari was not just cute jargon; it was absolutely necessary. Being gay or even being perceived as gay could land you in prison for “gross indecency.” It was taboo to write or speak the words “gay” or “homosexual.” Gay people needed a way to talk about their relationships and the other aspects of their lives without being understood by eavesdroppers. Polari came about as a form of insider slang, built from different languages, shifting and changing as it evolved. Language professor Paul Baker summed Polari up in his 2002 book Polari—The Lost Language of Gay Men, it was a lingo of “fast put-downs, ironic self-parody, and theatrical exaggeration.”

      Cockney rhyming slang replaces words with entire phrases, then shortens them. The word for telephone is dog. The first step was to rhyme something with “telephone,” which was the phrase “dog and bone.” That’s a bit wordy, so two-thirds of it was dropped. Likewise, “feet” became plates, through “plates of meat,” and “stairs” became apples through “apples and pears.”

      Although Polari saw the height of its popularity in the mid-twentieth century, its roots are much older. A similar argot called Parlyaree had been spoken in markets and fairgrounds at least as early as the eighteenth century, made up partly of Romany words with selections from thieves’ cant and backslang—words that are spelled and spoken phonemically backward, such as yob for boy and riah for hair. It also included, by way of the theater, the “broken Italian” used by street puppeteers who put on Punch and Judy shows. Even the name Polari is an Anglicization of an Italian word, parlare, “to speak.” As its use spread, it picked up bits of French, Yiddish, Italian, Shelta (the language of the Irish Travelers), London slang, and Cockney rhyming slang, among others.

      Besides being useful for discussing intimate business, Polari could be used to determine if someone else was gay. You could drop a few words into a conversation to see if the other person picked up on it. If they did not, no harm done. As such, the Polari glossary evolved to include a number of racy terms, so that people could set up rendezvous or discuss recent conquests without blowing their cover. Trade is a gay sex partner. TBH stands for “to be had,” which described that a person was sexually available, what we call today “DTF.” In Polari, an omi is a man, and a woman is a dona or a palone. An omi-palone is an effeminate man, or sometimes just a gay one. If you flip it around, a palone-omi is a lesbian. The best-known Polarism is drag, referring to women’s clothing when worn by men, possibly stemming from a Romany words for skirt. Where there is drag, someone is going to zhoosh something up. An effeminate gay man is a bit camp, and he may mince as he walks. A masculine man, or masculine anything for that matter, is butch. Does he have a nice bod? That’s Polari, too.

Good Mourning to You

      When I die, there won’t be a funeral. That’s not to say my body would not be properly taken care of. Obviously it will be, or my cats will eat me.