Polari flourished in the difficult years between the trial of Oscar Wilde and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. It was a kind of code, which enabled one gay man to identify another, allowed them to express themselves publicly without fear of arrest or reprisal and provided a vocabulary for talking about gay sex and sexuality.

Glossary: troll back, to return; nish, no more; aunt nells, ears; naff, straight, tasteless; ogle, eye; dolly, nice, pleasant; eek , face - a contraction of the backslang ecaf; cod , bad, fake; zhoosh, to titivate; drag, clothing, a special outfit; dish, attractive, to gossip or bum; trade, sexual partner; colin, horn, erection; fantabulosa, fantabulosa.

By the way, the next time you "cold-call" someone, looking for a positive outcome, you are speaking Polari.

Modern bandits known as “penmen,” “scratchers,” or “check raisers” had figured out that America’s rapid move away from old-fashioned cash transactions had created a whole new method of weapons-free criminality. By fudging the numbers on a check with some skillful penmanship, a scratcher could rob a business of thousands of dollars in broad daylight, literally smiling all the way to the bank. Better still, if he got caught, the docile nature of the robbery often led to appealingly light sentences.

By the time that section of the letter C was published for the OxfordEnglish Dictionary the only cunt that was listed by Murray was cunt-, a cross-reference to the prefixes cont-, count- with no mention whatsoever of thefemale body part. Fuck was also left out. Although these old words had beenin use since the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, they wouldhave to wait until the 1970s to be included in the OED. Murray did, however,include pudendum, a word derived from Latin for ‘that of which one ought tobe ashamed’, which he defined as ‘the privy parts, the external genital organs’with no reference to a woman or – God forbid – her vulva.

a fellowlexicographer and one of the Dictionary People, John Stephen Farmer, hadhis own legal drama. Farmer was writing a slang dictionary with WilliamHenley, and was struggling to publish the second volume (containing theletters C and F) of his work on grounds of obscenity. Farmer took hispublisher to court for breach of contract in 1891, and tried to convince a jurythat writing about obscene words in a dictionary did not make him personallyguilty of obscenity, but he lost the case and was ordered to pay costs.Eventually, he found fresh printers and avoided the Obscene Publications Actby arguing that his dictionary was published privately for subscribers only, notthe public, and the remarkable Slang and Its Analogues by Farmer and Henleywas published in seven volumes (from 1890 to 1904), with cunt and fuck andmany other words regarded as lewd on its pages. Farmer’s legal case and thepublic outcry that ensued was a clear deterrent for Murray.

The other conclusion, adopted by the "ordinary language" philosophers, is that use determines mcuning. Wittgenstein in his later work takes this' position, and speech-act theorist J. L. Austin is one of its most important defender!>

He understands the principles of linguistic change-for example, the tendency for slang terms to be-come part of the reputable vocabulary-and he addresses a practical problem that teachers of rhetoric have yet to solve, namely, the conflict between descriptive lin-guistics and the need to leach usage.

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