Global Gay Nation > Gay Homeland Movement
Endorsed or official languages in the Gay Homeland.
Rain:
I propose that certain varieties of gay speech should be endorsed (if not outright made co-official) languages of the Gay Homeland. I suggest the endorsement of Polari from London's gay community and Faggish from New York's.
Both are quite similar in many ways...but Polari is an actual literary vehicle with a small but expanding dictionary. Faggish (sometimes referred to as "Linguash" or "the Queen's English") has sporadically gone on to influence American English by transmitting certain words and idiomatic phrases ("you got served", as in the movie about breakdancers...the term is a Faggish idiom used in the ballroom scene and borrowed by breakdancers). Faggish is not yet a literary language. It does, however, have a rich and expanding musical output being the main vernacular for the ballroom scene and for various house music songs (i.e. "Do You Speak the Queen's English" by Joey Rolon).
Both also employ coded rhyming slangs. London's Polari uses the Cockney rhyming slang of the East End. Faggish uses two mutually intelligible forms of a pig Latin-based rhyming slang...one version is predominantly used by the African-American gay community, the other by the Puerto Rican and Dominican gay community.
BTW...for those who want to know...I speak Faggish fluently. I have also set about expanding the vocabulary of Faggish and resurrecting some words that had died out (like "carta"...the face, or "ling"...when something's done to overkill...like this post...ha ha ha). I was not at all suprised to learn this about myself either:
I speak New Yorkese.
***Your Linguistic Profile:***
50% General American English
35% Yankee
10% Dixie
0% Midwestern
0% Upper Midwestern
Feral:
--- Quote ---Your Linguistic Profile:
50% General American English
20% Upper Midwestern
15% Yankee
10% Midwestern
0% Dixie
--- End quote ---
Well, duh. Though don't tell too many people that my incomprehensible accent is "Midwestern." Midwesterners especially have difficulty understanding it. (That would be, I very strongly suspect, because I'm prone to using words like 'incomprehensible.')
I loved this bit:
--- Quote ---What do you call a traffic situation in which several roads meet in a circle and you have to get off at a certain point?
--- End quote ---
That would be.... a figment of your imagination. Roads do not do this. They meet at tidy right angles, just the two of them at a time. Of course, from time to time there are insane roads that really ought to be ripped out that meet an otherwise tidy intersection at a forty-five degree angle (usually without crossing it). That would be called "that stupid intersection that ought to be ripped out."
Rain:
I'm still waiting for berto to take this test. Even if letters of the alphabet are not part of the questionnaire.
Rain:
--- Quote ---That would be.... a figment of your imagination. Roads do not do this.
--- End quote ---
No...there are a few famous examples of roads converging onto a cricular "roundabout", to use a British term. Piccadilly Circus in London is one of them. The other is the Place de l'Étoile (Place Charles de Gaulle) in Paris. In NYC we have Columbus Circle which has a strange assortment of streets that do not so much radiate out from it, but just seem to coalesce there in no particularly orderly way (a perennial source of indignation for all New York drivers).
berto:
--- Quote ---No...there are a few famous examples of roads converging onto a cricular "roundabout", to use a British term.
--- End quote ---
The semi-notorious "Confusion Corner"
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