What is Polari?
Polari is a wonderful slang language that was used by gay men in Britain in the 1960s. Before being gay was as accepted as it is today, gay men used a secret 'slanguage' so that they could communicate with each other, without others knowing what fruity matters they were chatting about. The language adopted words from European languages like French, Italian, Yiddish and even a bit of Cockney Rhyming Slang. Sadly, the language is not used today although, much to my pleasure, some words did manage to survive and make it into our everyday speech.
Find out more on Matt & Andrej Koymasky's Polari Dictionary and on on this page.
Why make an Apple store in Polari?
Not so long ago I worked for the Apple online store. I spent my days creating pages and banners for all the stores across Europe. Everything we created for the online store had to be reproduced for all 8 languages that were used in the stores around Europe. As you may imagine, this was often a tedious process.
One day, stuck in the middle of a localisation haze, my slightly numbed brain decided it would be a fabulous idea to create an Apple store in a language that was more fun and interesting than German, Portuguese, Swedish or any other - Polari.
This would also be especially (in)appropriate because of a rule which was brought to my attention when I created a pink-background banner for Valentines day. The word was that Steve Jobs had explicitly said he did not want pink on the store homepage.
When Apple brought out what one blog termed 'the gayest set of iPods ever', I decided the time had come.