Ciezarney: Secret Language of Our Fathers

Several times growing up, my dad claimed to know a secret language.  He would utter several sentences of phrases containing more z's than my mind could comprehend.  At one point, my sister even seemed to be picking up on it.  I thought they were both crazy.  It seemed impossible to me that my dad could know anything of the sort.

Twenty odd years later I found out I was wrong. I'm listening to Robin's news on Howard Stern.  She plays a recording of Hulk Hogan and his son talking over the prison phones.  The son speaks English, then switches over to a combination of code words and a language containing z's galore and that sounded exactly like what my Dad had spoken so many years earlier.

Howard and the crew were stumped.  Via telephone, they brought in one of Hulksters friends and fellow Sirius broadcaster Bubba the Love Sponge. He revealed that Hulk was speaking a language called Carnie.  Professional wrestling got it's start in carnivals where a secret language was used to communicate behind the backs of the public.

Here are a few good explanations of carnie

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362-ellis

"Carnie cant, the secret language native to the American carnival circuit, also called z-Latin, alfalfa, or Ciezarney (amongst other titles). In Carnie, consonants are sporadically followed by the sequence <iez>; so, to use Russell and Murray’s pedantic example, phoneme becomes phiezoniezeme"

http://www.goodmagic.com/carny/ciazarn.htm

"A little like pig-latin... you insert an invariant nonsense syllable after each consonant. In Carny, the syllable is always "eaz", pronounced "ee-uz...Carny was once common inside the ring among wrestlers and referees, very much like Pig-Latin where a syllable is added to any word — "finish" being turned into "fee-ya-zin-ish" or "gimmick" being turned into "Gee-ya-zimmick."

Dad was never into wrestling, but he did work for a zoo/carnival back in the day. I guess he picked up a little carney speak along the way.

I can still hardly believe it believe it.  Dad actually was speaking something of a language. Sorry I doubted you Dad!