Palone

Polari for a woman, and in camp use an effeminate man; the partner of omi, a man, and half of omi-palone, a gay man.

Palone is Polari for a woman. It is the partner word of omi, a man, and together they build the most famous compound in the language, omi-palone, a gay man. Spellings drift, as everything in a spoken slang does: palone, polone, paloney, polony.

In camp Polari palone had a second life: it could also mean an effeminate man. In a world where gay men called each other she and her, that was cheek rather than abuse. Calling your friend a palone was not an insult, it was a promotion.

Where it comes from

Like most of the Polari words for people, palone is older than gay Polari. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds paloneys in an Australian paper in 1885 and polony in a London music-hall song around 1900, both meaning a woman, usually a young one. By the 1930s it was ordinary low slang for a girlfriend or a woman: Graham Greene's Brighton Rock (1938) asks "What about that polony he was with?".

The origin is uncertain. Green's gives the Italian pollone, a chick or young shoot; the Polari scholar W.S. Wilcox doubted it, noting that in Italian slang pollone can also mean penis, and suggested paglione, a straw mattress, a translation of the insulting Victorian cant word hay-bag for a woman. Nobody has settled it.

Palone in gay Polari

By the 1960s palone was firmly part of the gay vocabulary. A 1962 study of gay society in Britain listed polone, woman, in its appendix of gay slang, and in 1967 Julian and Sandy on Round the Horne were "vada-ing the great butch omis and dolly little palones trolling by". Paul Baker's list of core Polari words gives palone for woman and omi-palone for gay man.

How it is used today

Palone is less common today than omi, bona or vada, partly because modern gay slang has its own ways of calling a man she. Where it survives, it is in camp banter, drag and the revival of interest in Polari. It is a word about gender play more than about women: in the mouth of a gay man, palone is almost always a wink.

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