Dish

In Polari, the backside, the ass; in wider gay slang also a very attractive man, and as a verb to gossip, as in dishing the dirt.

In Polari, dish means the backside: the bum, the ass, and more specifically the hole. A bona dish is a great ass, and vada the dish on him is exactly what it sounds like. It is one of the frankest words in the language, and it shows that Polari was not only for compliments about faces and hair.

Gay English has two more dishes on the menu. A dish is also a very attractive man, a feast for the eyes, and to dish is to gossip, the more malicious the better. Context usually tells you which one is meant, and sometimes all three apply to the same evening.

Where it comes from

The image is food. Since Shakespeare's time dish has meant something tasty to be served up and enjoyed, and from there an attractive person. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds dish for a handsome person of either sex in the 1890s, in the gay Victorian erotic novel Teleny.

The Polari sense is more specific. The lexicographer Eric Partridge recorded dish for the buttocks as homosexual slang "since ca. 1954", and Paul Baker's list of Polari words gives it as anus or bum. It belongs with eek, riah and lallies in the Polari anatomy chart, the part of the body nobody could mention in public, discussed in public anyway.

Dishing the dirt

The gossip sense is American in origin. Green's finds dish for malicious talk in the early 1900s, and by 1932 it was in the gay novel Scarlet Pansy. Gay slang turned it into a whole genre: dishing is gossip about third parties, recorded from 1972, and the filmmaker Kenneth Anger wrote of Hollywood "dishery" in 1975. To dish someone is to take them apart behind their back, with style.

Dishing is cousin to reading and shade, but with a difference: you read someone to their face, you dish them to everyone else. And when there is tea to spill, dishing is how it gets served.

How it is used today

The Polari dish lives mostly in camp jokes and in the revival of interest in the old language. The other two meanings are everywhere: "what a dish" for a handsome man, "let's dish" before brunch gossip. On the apps you might even get all three in one conversation, a compliment, a photo request and a story about the last guy.

Related terms