Talk:Polari

message: I'm almost certain, most if not all of these terms appear in the lingo spoken by Alex and some of the other characters in "A Clockwork Orange," of course there are words that appear there that don't derive (or share a common history with?  maybe?) Polari but could someone with more knowledge about that book and this than me give it a look see?
:I actually stumbled on this wiki article because earlier today I got involved in a blog discussion about someone else's attempted parody of A Clockwork Orange. I already knew that Burgess's invented youth slang "Nadsat" is mostly based on Russian, which I speak adequately well, but in trying to explain Nadsat-isms like "eggy-weggies" and "appy-polly-loggies," I eventually Googled my way to the wiki Polari article. 
:Anyway, I don't recall any specific Polari terms that appear in A Clockwork Orange, but I think you could argue that some of the "cutesy-poo baby-talk" terms in Nadsat, such as "eggy-weggy," could have been inspired by Polari, which of course uses a lot of (ahem) girly-sounding words for camp effect. (On the other hand, Burgess may have again been playing linguistically on Russian, which makes more frequent use of diminutive endings than English does.)
:Apart from this, Nadsat is of course analogous to Polari in that a significant part of its vocabulary is derived not by clever wordplay (such as Cockney rhyming slang or reverse spellings), but by straightforward "encoding" of English words into a foreign language. For instance, coining the Polari term "vada," meaning "to see," required no particular ingenuity -- the word comes directly from the Italian verb of the same meaning, with just a bit of phonetic alteration. Similarly, Alex in Clockwork Orange uses the word "devotchka" to mean "teenage girl" or "young woman," and Burgess borrowed it as-is (but with a slight semantic shift) from the Russian word for "little girl" (девочка). Throbert McGee (talk) 20:21, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: A Clockwork Orange

message: Some Polari may derive from army slang from WW2 - 'binti' and 'bimbo', for example, were both RAF slang in India, from Hindi, and some may derive from esperanto - 'bona' is Esperanto for 'good'. User:Lincspoacher
:Esperanto and Italian and Latin and Catalan,... --Error 21:07, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Other origin

message: Another use in mainstream media (well not quite that mainstream, but you get what I mean) was in DC Comics old series 'Doom Patrol' when it was written by Grant Morrison circa late 80's. He had a team member known as 'Danny the Street' who was a sentient street that communicated with the team in Polari The biz 15:29, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Other modern usage 

message: Yes, "baloney" was in American English for quite a long time and is historically a reference to bologna sausage. It should also be noted, however, that it may incorporate some sense of the word "blarney", and be, in a way, a portmanteau word.
:I always thought the Polari word was Palony (meaning "woman" - the opposite of ome or Omey or Omi (however it is spelt) meaning "Man".  I don't think Baloney was ever a polari word!
:: Yes in the UK as a kid I remember a cheap sausage in a plastic 'membrane' called a "Polony" that was popular as a picnic snack. Probably still available, I live in Australia Nowadays.--MichaelGG (talk) 06:26, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The Oxford English Dictionary has "Humbug; nonsense. (Commonly regarded as f. BOLOGNA (sausage) but the connection remains conjectural)" so either sense applies.  pablo 12:08, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  More baloney 

message: I removed the suggestion that the word "bitch" originated or significantly developed in this subculture.  I haven't seen, nor can I imagine, any credible argument to this effect.  The OED has it in the basically modern sense of the word ("Whom calleste thou queine, skabde biche?") from the 15th century.
:Besides "bitch," the article's Polari Glossary appears to have quite a number of words that probably aren't by any stretch of the imagination specific to Polari, even though they may well have been popular among British gays who also made habitual use of "native Polari" terms. ("Basket," "butch, "chicken," and "drag" would all jump out to my American eyes even if they weren't hyperlinked!) Throbert McGee (talk) 19:49, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bitch 

message: I don't think that this word is polari, let alone exists. If anyone else has information to the contrary please could you post it at WP:Articles for deletion/Prook. Cheers   pablohablo. 15:52, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Prook]] 

message: The Romani word Nasvalo mean to be ill or sick. Romani never use the word Nasvalo in any such context to mean broken etc.
Phagadi means broken. phagav = I break, Tu phages = You break, o phagel = he breaks & oi Phagel = she breaks.
Bi Lacho means 'no good'.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.96.252.34 (talk) 11:02, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I've changed it.   pablohablo. 11:35, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Romani word Nasvalo doesn't mean 'broken, no good' 

message: I've taken "parlyaree" out as an alternative name because it says in the article "the almost identical parlyaree". Now either it's the same, or it's almost the same, but it can't be both. Also, in the lead it says polari can be traced back to the 19th, or maybe the sixteenth centuries, but in "Usage" it says parlyaree can be traced to the 17th century. Richerman (talk) 01:54, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Parlyaree doesn't seem to be exactly the same thing 

message: Looking at the list of Polari words, many of them were in common use in mainstream Australia until recently, and in fact most Australians over the age of 50 would consider the sentence "The cove scarpered out of the shop with a pair of strides" as quite unremarkable, although old fashioned. --MichaelGG (talk) 03:56, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Australian mainstream slang usage 

message: This seems to me to be mainly a list of general London, and/or common British-English, slang.  The number of "genuine" Polari words is small as I think the article says: examples include riah, omi-pallone, nante.  It's possible that users of Polari also heavily used London/British slang, but that doesn't make it Polari 121.99.84.227 (talk) 04:48, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Glossary 

message: The sections "In Popular Culture" and "Use Today" are not clearly distinguishable in this article. Merge those sections? 128.148.231.12 (talk) 14:48, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  "In Popular Culture" vs "Use Today" 

message: The article is hard to read as it conflates 1. All of the time Polari was used - 300 years! 2. Gives no sources for the use of a word - so it cannot be seen in context nor etymology. 3. talks about Italian - yet in Italy there are many languages spoken which are NOT Italian. They are often called "dialects of Italian", but as the wikipedia article on languages of Italy makes clear this is wrong. They are not dialects of Italian as say Yorkshire dialect is a dialect of English, but rather they are independently evolved languages which happen to be in use in Italy and have some mutual comprehension. The term dialect here is misleading and it appears has misled people who wrote about Polari and Italian. Has Polari really come from Tuscan language in Northern Italy? or more likely from lects found in Southern Italy and Malta?
There also seems to be an anglo-centric bias with a desire to only record words that appear not to be the same as words in English - if Polari comes from several languages then it would have words from English in it and these should be recorded too - and they would be Polari and also English. The likelihood of such words being borrowed from flash and cockney is quite high. https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/convict-sydney/what-was-flash-language  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.115.204.102 (talk) 13:36, 24 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  poor linguistics