The Polari Bible - Introduction and Credits read ... This is a polari version of the King James Bible, produced by the Manchester (UK) house of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Polari - a mixture of French, Italian, Cockney and a whole host of other languages - was once used asan argot in the UK gay community, and has an interesting history in its own right. Since the decriminalisation of homosexuality some years ago it is no longer used as a means of concealing meaning from outsiders. It is, instead, used for its tremendous camp value. Polari reached its apogee with the inspired script-writing of Barry Took and Marty Feldman in the tremendously popular 1960s BBC radio series Round the Horne. In this, a favourite feature involved "Julian and Sandy" two outrageously camp characters, played by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick engaged in a variety of different business ventures patronised by the urbane Kenneth Horne. Much of their dialogue was in high-polari, and up-and-down the UK millions of families tucked in to their Sunday roast, unaware of much of what was being said. Indeed had the BBC management been aware of the meaning of much of Took and Feldman's brilliant writing, the show would have been taken off the air. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are an international order of gay and lesbian nuns and monks. The UK sisters have always used polari in their ceremonies (and for that matter in everyday use). It is, in fact, quite surprising how much polari has entered mainstream gay language (for example chicken or naff), and in recent years there has been a resurgence in interest in the language, similar to that in Gaelic - although Polariis arguably a living language. History Work on the original King James Bible began early in the 17th century, and it has become a watchword for the majesty and power of its language. Vulgarising it by translating it in to Polari would be an act of cultural vandalis makin to translation in to Scots. But good taste has never yet limited the Sisters' activities, so we did it anyway. Besides a phrase like Rom 6:23 - For the parkering ninty of kertever is carking it - has a beauty and majesty allof its very own. The translation grew from a chance conversation between Sr. Matic de Bauchery and Sr. Martini Bianca on Polari and musing about the fact that it should be possible to translate from common English to Polari "using steam" (it should be noted that some of the older sisters have only a tenuous grasp on new technology and personal hygiene). As the sherry flowed, the idea began to take shape, and a desire expressed that such a "steampolyglot" also be connected to the "electric telegraph". The requirements were then written on the back of an envelope and sent to a group of research nuns based at the Polari Research Endeavour (PRE) at the City University Manchester (CUM) - formerly the Longsight Academy for Wayward Girls. There a group of crack (addled) polari linguists and computer scientists studied the problem. The solutionto which they came was a relatively simple one, involving using a scripting language called perl although this,apparently, has nothing to do with neckalces. Essentially, the bible was divided in to its component books, and each of these read in verse by verse and runthrough a filter written in perl which performed a number of transformations and substitutions on the text based ona set of rules. There are currently a little over 800 rules, so given the 31,000 verses in the bible this requires a total of something like 24,000,000 transformations. Another perl script then formatted the polari in to HTML.