Holy cow, maverick; I had no idea. [aunt nells perking up]
have you ever met a waiter, bartender or, indeed, drag queen, who hails from Rio or Madrid, Paris or Rome? Well--no.

It's interesting, isn't it--the many many different points of view people have? Ex.: ...the difficult years between the trial of Oscar Wilde and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. (ea) My first response was: they were?

Okay--now I know that the British have Cockney rhyming slang, and polari (Polari?); do we US'n's have anything comparable? I mean, a kind of code-language, not simply regional idioms.