Lallies

Polari for legs, singular lally: the word British gay men used to admire a man's thighs out loud without being understood.

Lallies is Polari for legs. One leg is a lally, but the word nearly always comes in pairs, because legs are rarely admired one at a time. Bona lallies are good legs, shapely lallies are the ones that make you turn around, and lally-drags are trousers, the things that unfortunately cover them.

It is a body word, and like most Polari body words it was made for cruising: a way to comment on a man's thighs out loud, in a crowded bar, without anyone at the next table understanding what you meant.

Where it comes from

Nobody knows for sure. Green's Dictionary of Slang can only suggest that the word grew out of the shared first letter, l for leg, and lists a family of forms: lallie, lally, lall, lallipeg and lyle. The American lexicographer Bruce Rodgers proposed in 1972 that lyles came from Anglo-Chinese, but there is no proof of that.

The earliest written example in Green's is from 1962, in a study of British gay society that listed "lyles, legs" in its glossary. A memoir of the 1930s, collected in the oral history Between the Acts, remembers that in that decade "legs are lallipegs".

Julian and Sandy's lallies

As with so much of Polari, the BBC made lallies famous. In a 1966 episode of Round the Horne, Julian and Sandy imagined Samson "huge and all butch, with great bulging thews and whopping great lallies". Thews, for thighs, came along for the ride.

On the boats

Polari was strong among gay men who worked on passenger ships, and lallies was part of the inventory. Paul Baker and Jo Stanley, in their history of gay seafarers, describe shipmates talking in Polari about who was fanciable: his dolly eek, pretty face, his bona riah, nice hair, his fabulosa ogles, fantastic eyes, and his shapely lallies.

How it is used today

Lallies survives in camp talk and in the revival of interest in Polari, usually in the same sentence as bona and vada. It is a gift for the gym crowd: after leg day, nobody says "nice quads" when they can say "bona lallies".

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