Fantabulosa : a dictionary of Polari and gay slang

252 Pages·2002·2.646 MB·English

by  Paul Baker

FANTABULOSA
A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang
PAUL BAKER
Continuum
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SEl 7NX
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503
wu1w.continuumbooks.con1
First published 2002
© Paul Baker 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-8264-5961-7
Typeset by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Vl
Preface vii
Introduction to the Dictionary of Polari 1
Dictionary of Polari 9
Introduction to the Dictionary of Gay Slang 63
Dictionary of Gay Slang 69
References 217
Index 220
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Barry Took and Marty Feldman, award winning writers of
the enduringly successful BBC radio programme, Round
The Horne, were initiators of the use of this language in
broadcasting, which was voiced by their creations, Julian
and Sandy.
Eric Barela, Damien Barr, Lawrence Brennan, R. Chloupek,
Joseph E. Cribb, John Galilee, Matt Lippiatt, Tony McEnery,
David Raven, Rebecca Scott, Julian Smalley and Jay
Yesitsme. The Natural Bear Classification System is repro
duced with kind permission from Bob Donahue and Jeff
Stoner.
The Polari dictionary is adapted from Polari: The Lost
Language of Gay Men, by the same author, published by
Routledge.
PREFACE
Welcome to this Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang - a
glossary of common (and little-known) words and phrases
used by gay men and lesbians. Two of the main themes
that run across this dictionary are humour and sex, with
many of the words showing an ironic, playful attitude
towards sexuality, often inspired by the tradition of camp.
As well as being funny, gay slang is often subversive,
assigning bold new meanings to words that already exist,
tackling taboos and laughing in the face of adversity. In
terms of academic interest, gay slang can tell us something
about the subcultures that have created the words, their
preoccupations and the ways that they organize their
experiences. In defining concepts that exist outside of the
heterosexual remit, gay slang can sometimes be shocking
to the uninitiated, frequently comical, but rarely boring.
Slang evolves rapidly - words appear, become popular for
a while and are then replaced by new ones just as quickly.
One of the aims of this dictionary is to chart as many of
these words as possible, before they are forgotten.
The book is divided into two sections, the second covers
the more general gay slang used in English-speaking
countries, while the first part is concerned with Polari - a
language variety used by gay men and lesbians in the UK
over the past hundred years. Some speakers were so adept
at talking in Polari that it sometimes resembled a language
in itself rather than a vocabulary. The line between Polari
and 'general' gay slang is rather blurred in the cases of
some words (many Polari speakers used both forms) and
where in doubt I've referred readers to additional entries
in different sections of the book.
How were these words collected? For the past six years
I made a nuisance of myself by asking gay men and
lesbians to tell me their favourite slang words and phrases.
viii PREFACE
The internet also yielded an abundance of terms - and I
spent many an evening lurking on some of the more
specialist chat-rooms. Other words came from television
and film - Will and Grace, The Graham Norton Show and The
Broken Hearts Club being particularly useful sources. I've
talked to gay sailors, drag queens, hustlers and up-and
coming porn models in my search for words - being a
lexicographer does have some perks. While most of the
words in the dictionary have come from the UK and the
USA, a few are more specific to Canada, Australia and South
Africa (which has its own form of gay slang called Gayle1
).
One reason that slang is so popular is that people tend
to process and remember slang words better than literal
uses of the same words.2 Slang, being non-standard, gives
its users a feeling of exclusivity and secretiveness; as old
slang terms are discovered by the media and then relayed
to the mainstream, new words must continuously be
invented in order to keep ahead of the masses. Slang, in
other words, has a lot in common with fashion.
Slang is also creative, and as well as coining a new
concept or a new word for an existing concept, it allows
the user to demonstrate this creativity. Instead of referring
to a man who derives gratification from watching other
people as a voyeur, one could call him a peek freak, reveal
ing that a little bit of extra effort went into the creation of
the term, in order to make the words rhyme. As a group,
gay men are often stereotypically associated with areas
where creativity is required (the performing arts, the visual
arts and the decorative arts) so their linguistic creativity is
not surprising.
Gay slang is full of contradictions - it can be a form of
aggression or one-upmanship, revealing the user to be
quick-witted and giving him or her membership status in
the subculture. A single word of gay slang can include
1 Ken Cage is currently writing a book on Gayle.
2 Gibbs and Nagaoka (1985).
ix
PREFACE
some people and exclude others. It may tell us about the
person under discussion, but it tells us a lot more about
the person who uses the slang. It can be witty, catty or
scatological. It can protect the innocent who don't under
stand the meaning of the word, or exploit them by with
holding information. Gay slang can simplify the world by
reducing it to stereotypes or it can enable us to address its
complexity by creating subtle distinctions between related
concepts.
Slang contains elements that can be interpreted as
humorous or child-like: punning, repetition and sing-song
rhyming are sometimes redolent of playground jokes or
nursery rhymes. Many slang words are created via tried
and-tested formulae. Rhyming phrases such as gay spray
and horny porny are popular because they are easy to
remember, and with a large number of slang items in the
lexicon of the gay subculture, it is likely that rhymes are
going to stick in people's heads.
While rhymes are one of the most common forms found
in gay slang, there are many others; pararhymes (flip-flop),
repetitions <fifty-fifty, yoyo) and blends, which combine the
meanings or sounds from two words together (glamazon,
gymbot, homovestite, quaggot). Alliterations are phrases
which begin with the same letter of the alphabet: happy
hips, lipstick lesbian, meat market; while consonances contain
the repetition towards the end of each word in the phrase:
lily of the valley, gender butcher. Assonances employ a rep
etition of the central vowel sound: lesbian bed death, play
space, pushy sub, fuck buddy; and reverse rhymes have an
identical initial consonant and vowel sound: muscle muffin,
yum-yuk.
Another popular method of creating slang terms
involves truncating the word to a single syllable (tats,
tache), or by using an abbreviation format (ALAWP, APS,
JO, MMMB). The success of such forms of slang can be
partly explained by Zipf's Law which states that the
shorter a word or phrase, the more likely it is to be found
x PREFACE
in verbal discourse. Short items are easier to remember
than long items, and the process of chunking, by reducing
longer items to memorable chunks allows them to be
retained more easily in memory. Common phrases can be
abbreviated to their initials and are easier to say or type.
Importantly, abbreviations can save money as well as time
- many magazines calculate the price of placing a personal
ad by the number of words in the advert - it is cheaper to
write 'VWE GWM with GSOH' than 'very well endowed
gay white male with good sense of humour'.
A further aspect of using mechanical formations in slang
creation is to exclude and confuse outsiders. This is per
haps best demonstrated by the use of abbreviation and
acronyms. An outsider, hearing TBH, LDU or MOMD
would find it difficult to decipher their meanings (To Be
Had, Leather Denim Uniform and Man Of My Dreams). As
many of these abbreviations are sexual in nature, they give
the speakers protection, allowing them to talk privately in
public situations. The different ways of creating slang
words - rhyming, abbreviating, alliterating, and so on help
us to recognize a new word as slang. If we already know
fag hag, nadbag, bean-queen, and dikes on spikes, we will more
readily be able to categorize boy toy as slang when we hear
it for the first time, even if we are unsure of its meaning.
Metaphor is another way in which slang operates. Met
aphors are not restricted to gay slang per se; for example,
heterosexual men sometimes refer to unattractive women
with animal metaphors: dogs, mooses, horses etc., while
attractive women are compared to food: honey, sugar, peach.
A slang metaphor may tell us something about the person
who is using the word - for example the phrase a dirty
weekend implies an inverse association between sex and
cleanliness. However, there are a number of metaphors
which tend to be associated with gay slang, and these help
us to understand how gay men and lesbians view their
subculture, themselves and each other.
A proportion of gay male slang words contain female
xi
PREFACE
metaphors, a phenomenon with a long historical tradition.
The association of gay men with effeminacy still lingers
on, suffused with ambivalence in gay subcultures; it can
be used as an insult, so an unattractive friend is called
Miss Congeniality, while a judgemental one is Judge Judy.
However, other feminizing terms are kinder, demonstrat
ing affectionate relationships - a sister is a close friend,
while a mother is a gay mentor. Masculine slang words on
the other hand are used to refer to sex: ergo the phrase
who's your daddy? Family metaphors can also be looked
upon as imposing a system of hierarchical values upon
gay subculture, whereby terms such as daddy and mother
indicate power, words like son and baby butch indicate
youth and other terms such as auntie or grandmother indicate
age without power.
Other common gay metaphors involve food (jam-pot,
alley apple, beefcake, fish and chips), animals (bear, bitch, bull
dyke, bunny fuck, pussy, queen bee), religion (born again virgin,
having church, hell-sparking the pronoun), colours (brown job,
black hole, green queen, pink pound), clothing (clutch your
pearls, flannel shirt dyke, glass closet), the cinema (friend of
Dorothy, guest star, final g~rl, zsa-zsa) and royalty (dish queen,
drag queen, dethroned, the monarchy).
The choice of particulat types of metaphor is not random
- some metaphors such as those to do with royalty and
the cinema recast the users in more powerful and glamor
ous spheres. Royalty metaphors often connote social status
while the cinema metaphor is a form of adult story telling:
you and your friends become the occupants of an exciting
alternative world where everyone else is merely an extra
or a guest star. Food and animal metaphors are often
strongly related to sex, as is religion - sex can be explicitly
linked to worship in gay slang, while clothing and colour
metaphors hark back to the older stereotype of the creative,
fashion-conscious queen.
So what sort of things do gay men and lesbians have
slang words for? One of the most common categories are
xii PREFACE
words for different types of people, specifically people
who are likely to be encountered within that culture -
people are classified according to their age, attractiveness,
specific sexual preferences, their sexual availability and
how masculine or feminine they are. There are also words
for particular places - clubs, cruising grounds, and the
home as well as words for outsiders - especially the police,
or those who exist on the limits of the subculture - married
men, closet cases and straight lads who might be interested
given the right circumstances. There are words for specific
sexual practices and scenes, and words for parts of the
body (especially those that receive a lot of attention during
sex). Some terms describe political activism and forms of
oppression, while others have been created by the media
or by academia.
Slang is one of the most interesting and innovative
forms of language use, and this is especially true of gay
slang. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I
enjoyed researching and writing it. And if you learn some
thing new, laugh or raise an eyebrow in the process, then
my work is done.