“It means to tweak it, making it better, giving it some personality, your own personal touch,” Mr. It is interesting to note that the word’s current resurgence can largely be attributed to that bastion of 21st-century gay culture, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” on which viewers delighted in Carson Kressley admonishing his hapless new subject to “jeuje” up an ensemble by popping a collar or rolling up a sleeve. “It was all double entendre, and hidden meaning, deeply wonderful stuff and no doubt would have thrilled anyone familiar with Polari, to hear it on the radio, and know what it meant,” Mr. In the 1960s, Polari shot to mainstream awareness thanks to BBC radio’s popular comedy program “Round the Horne ,” which followed the campy adventures of out-of-work theater actors Julian and Sandy, played by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, gay icons of British entertainment. “It was gradually this ‘styling’ sense that became the dominant one, possibly because it was more useful for gay men,” Mr. to zhoosh off (to go away), to zhoosh a bevvy (to gulp down a drink), to steal something (a zhoosh bag was a swag bag).” Baker puts weight on the theory that the word “may have come about due to its onomatopoeic qualities.” Originally, he wrote in an email, “it was used in a variety of contexts, e.g. Jonathon Green, who has spent the last 40ish years working on a comprehensive online dictionary of slang, cited early usage of the word - spelled as “zhoosh”- in a 1977 article from the British newspaper Gay News: “We would zhoosh our riahs, powder our eeks, climb into our bona new drag, don our batts and troll off to some bona bijou bar.” “It was also used for general gossip, to be hilariously funny, and to ‘read’ people with the most cutting put-downs,” Mr. Baker said the language allowed gay men to communicate frankly and identify one another, but with its irrepressible jauntiness, it also celebrated the customs and spirit of a marginalized community. Baker said, Polari was spoken throughout the gay community in Britain, which had been driven underground by the country’s laws policing sexual behavior. Some Polari terms are “back slang,” or existing words pronounced as if they were spelled backward (“riah” for “hair,” for instance). Polari thrived among Britain’s fairgrounds, circuses and markets, metabolizing words from here and there (including bits of Romani), then twisting - or zhuzhing - them up.
Since sailors knew all manner of ropes, knots and rigging apparatus, they often took jobs on land as theater stagehands and circus performers.
He said it likely began as workplace slang among British sailors, who, traveling abroad, encountered the lingua franca of mainland Europe - i.e. Baker, who has written two books on Polari, including “Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang,” the language is the product of “a very complicated and nonlinear chain” of events.
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