this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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Well, we take the hankies out when someone catches a whiff of Lily Law or Jennifer Justice.
But for real, both are really cool means of coded communication. Hankies are definitely less of a “Gay men” thing than a leather community thing, though that’s getting into niche enough subcultural divisions that it’s not the sort of thing most people care to learn and there’s really no point for them to. But yeah the hankies partly served the same role as polari, it’s a way to communicate illegal desires in a way that requires being taught the code. It’s actually quite similar to learning drug slang, except with a higher barrier to entry back in the day.
Really I just like introducing people to Polari because I think it's cool.
That’s fair, I love the language (or is it a cant?), especially considering it’s the only language I know to be descended from thieves cant. The use of language for such purposes is fascinating because it’s easy to see how many people have or had some version of something like it in our own lives, just slang we use so only people we want to understand us do, especially as teenagers.