This is the illusionist in which I, Helen Zaltsman, give language a bit of a shush, shush it up a bit.

Today's episode is about a language, or maybe it's an argot, slang, a cant, possibly even an anti-language,

a code to signal to some people and keep secrets from others.

On with the show.

In 1982, Princess Anne, the second child of the Queen of England, Olympic equestrian, is competing at the Badminton Horse Trials.

She's on a horse and she's jumping over all these obstacles.

And oops, she slips and falls in the water of an obstacle.

On all of the photographers rush forward to take a photograph and she tells them to naff off.

Well, she's not allowed to drop an f-bomb really because it's horrible.

But naff was a Polari word.

Polari, just a couple of decades before, it would have been unthinkable that someone like Princess Anne would have used a Polari word,

or that she would have even known one.

I'm Paul Baker, I'm Professor of English Language at Lancaster University.

And Paul started studying Polari in the mid-1990s, interviewing some of the last known surviving speakers,

and along the way, compiling a dictionary of Polari in Gayslang, and writing his new book Fabulosa,

the story of Polari, Britain's secret gay language.

What does the word Polari mean?

It means to speak or to talk or to say, if they're close to an Italian word, which has a very similar meaning,

and that's where it comes from.

Polari.

That's it, yeah.

And you have like Polari pipes, which is a telephone, for example.

...