this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
1009 points (97.7% liked)
memes
10714 readers
1981 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.