Archive for the ‘Italian’ Category
August 19, 2025
The trigger was the wonderful mixed seafood with tofu soup 海鲜豆腐汤 from the Amazing Wok in San Carlos, a couple weeks ago (and then several times since). which sent me back to lunches on my own in Reading PA roughly 75 years ago, after I was finished with the program of Saturday morning for boys at the Reading YMCA. I was then on my own in the city (browsing in stores, just walking the city, sometimes going to a movie, mostly ransacking the Reading Public Library), until late in the afternoon, when I went to my parents’ store on N. 5th St. — the Memo Shop, high-end costume jewelry — and the family did a little grocery shopping and my dad drove us the 4 miles home to West Lawn.
The lunches were sometimes sandwiches or other diner food at one of the lunch counters in town, but usually were Chinese (American) or Italian (American), at two little restaurants that I remember as being in basements on S. 6th St. (but these physical details are quite likely to have been altered in memory). There wasn’t room for a lot of menu adventure at either place. Typical lunches:
Chinese: egg drop soup or hot and sour soup; plus beef and broccoli, chow mein, or egg foo young
Italian: spaghetti and meatballs most often, sometimes veal parmesan or fettuccine Alfredo or a lunch special of the day
I had money from my parents to cover these cheap lunches, plus a 15% tip.
I don’t remember the decor at the Chinese place (probably minimal), but the Italian place had an impressive painting of what I recall as the Bay of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius in the background.
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Posted in Chinese, Italian, Language and food, Memory, My life, Reading | 2 Comments »
May 20, 2025
(This will, somewhat surprisingly, eventually veer into men’s bodies and some man-on-man sex, recounted in street language, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest; I’m sorry, but not even the best of Verdi opera and Italian tennis can quite counterbalance naked guys going at it with one another)
Today’s morning names were Rigoletto and Sinner, and for a change I knew exactly why they were in my head: Rigoletto is the name of an opera by Verdi (from which the magnificent quartet Bella figli dell’amore was playing on my music feed during my 2 am whizz break); and Sinner is the surname of someone who turns out to be an astoundingly famous Italian tennis player but was known to me only from a Sergio Scalise Facebook posting yesterday in which this Sinner was identified as a great champion who does commercials for De Cecco, Lavazza, and La Roche — I am, famously, deeply ignorant of sports; and also, despite Sergio’s occasional attempts at educating me, neglectfully ignorant of matters social, cultural, and political in today’s Italy (I’m not merely not au courant, but actually inert). This is Jannik Sinner; I had never laid eyes on him until this morning (I’ve been entertained by a recent Lavazza commercial, but it’s one for the American audience and doesn’t have Jannik Sinner in it). I go on at such length about JS because my readers from or connected to Italy will find it impossible to believe that I had no idea who Sinner — that athletic and cultural phenom — is.
Now, the coming program: about Rigoletto, briefly; about Jannik Sinner, at greater length, with a note about Lavazza coffee commercials; a side note about Google searches; and then a raunchy digression on the Italian jobs of the title.
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Posted in AI, Art, Italian, Language and sports, Language and the body, Language of advertising, Language of sex, Morning names, Music, Slurs | Leave a Comment »
March 16, 2025
Elsewhere, in my queues for posting, there’s one in the Kharkiv Opera series on a fortuitous soup, a delicious invention I will probably never have the ingredients for again. Today I write about a soup made from leftovers, but one I have every time I order the base dish, Bari pasta from the restaurant Crepevine in Mountain View CA.
As I was making the soup yesterday, it occurred to me to wonder about the name of the dish (the dish is fettuccine with a fresh salmon, spinach and Parmesan cream sauce — to which I have shrimp and salmon fillets added). I was aware that Bari was a city in Italy, but had no idea whether it had any connection with fettuccine or with salmon and spinach cream sauce; for all I knew, the name was chosen purely for its sound — it sounds crisp and Euro-trendy — or because someone at the restaurant had family from the city Bari (restaurants and their dishes are often named that way) or in honor of someone named Bari (that happens too), or specifically in honor of someone from Bari whose signature dish this was.
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Posted in Italian, Language and food, My life, Names | Leave a Comment »
August 15, 2024
That would be today’s holiday: Ferragosto! From Wikipedia:
Ferragosto is a public holiday celebrated on 15 August in all of Italy. It originates from Feriae Augusti, the festival of Emperor Augustus, who made 1 August a day of rest after weeks of hard work on the agricultural sector. [During the festivities, horse races were organized throughout the Empire and draft animals (oxen, donkeys and mules) were released from work and adorned with flowers.]
As the festivity was created for political reasons, the [Roman] Catholic Church decided to move the festivity to 15 August, which is the [feast day of the] Assumption of [the Blessed Virgin] Mary …
(#1) Imperial illustration from the Scuola Leonardo da Vinci website, “Ferragosto in Italy” on 8/13/21 (with holiday wishes in Latin and in Italian)
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Italian | 1 Comment »
June 18, 2024
(Tasteless and obscene, in two languages, so not to everyone’s taste)
(#1) A rainbow raised fist, representing proud defiance; image from Redbubble, by designer MAS-S (in Berlin, Germany)
And now the frocio ‘queer, homo, faggot, fairy, queen’ mock-Pope intoning benedico questa frociata ‘I bless this faggotry’ (more literally, ‘this faggoting’) at the 6/15 Pride celebration in Rome, where t-shirts proclaimed “There is never too much frociaggine” — never too much faggotry — as participants enthusiastically embraced every vulgar insult they know (but especially frociaggine), turning them into proud badges of identity and defiance, raising the rainbow fist:
(#2) (photo from the National Catholic Reporter on 6/16/24)
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Posted in Derivation, Etymology, Homosexuality, Italian, Language and religion, Language and sexuality, Morphology, Playful morphology, Rainbow, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
March 22, 2024
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, with yet another pun on the name of a rock band; this time it’s Rage Against the Machine that’s being punned on:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Tomato Based Ideology”, alluding to the fact that what’s commonly called ragu (or Bolognese sauce) in the US is tomato-based (and sometimes meatless, as in the “traditional” variety of the commercial brand RAGÚ), though classic Italian ragù (aka Bolognese sauce) is a meat-based sauce with only a bit of tomato in it, and though the most common US name for meatless tomato-based pasta sauce is just spaghetti sauce (in fancier settings, AmE marinara sauce) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
The text in the speech balloon — with a RATM anti-corporate political message — coming from a thoroughly American source, emphasizes the meaty side of (some) American ragu; this is ragu used to name what is mostly called just spaghetti sauce in the US (a tomato-based sauce with substantial amounts of browned minced meat, usually ground beef, in it), though in fancier settings this everyday pasta sauce might be billed as AmE Bolognese sauce.
Obviously, food naming in this domain is a gigantic rat’s nest, but vocabulary isn’t the point of the cartoon, the band name pun is, so I’ll put off the lexicography for the moment and focus first on the pun and the rock band.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Italian, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Puns | Leave a Comment »
February 13, 2024
ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre
— Leporello cataloguing Don Giovanni’s sexual conquests
Mitch Marks has sent me a comic strip appropriate for the day (which drips with sex) and personally meaningful to me (it has a Zwicky in it, though only for alphabetical purposes): the 2/13 strip in Graham Harrop’s comic UFO, in which a character I’ll call John (for Don Juan / Don Giovanni) prepares to catalogue his infidelities, not by country as in the Mozart / Da Ponte opera (but in Spain there are already a thousand and three), but by letter of the alphabet, from Alice Aabz to Zelda Zwicky:
(#1) John’s Valentine’s Day gift to Moira
About the day. 2/13 is the day before Valentine’s Day; and also (my own invention) what I’ve called LDV Day, Lincoln Darwin Valentine Day, an occasion for rampant man-on-man sexual excess; and also (this year) Mardi Gras (whoop whoop) — so it’ s pretty much drenched in sex.
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Posted in Books, Holidays, Italian, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Music | Leave a Comment »
December 26, 2023
(The randy elves of 12/22/23 are engaged in 3-way man-on-man sex, described here by its makers in street language, so this part of the program is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest (IF THAT’S YOU: DO NOT READ); the rest of it is about a variety of seasonal customs, some of them off-beat but none requiring policing (PLEASE READ AND ENJOY))
In my title: highlights of the first day of the three-day run-up to Christmas 2023.
Each day provides two occasions to celebrate:
— 12/22/23: CAYF (the gay porn movie Cum All Ye Faithful) climax day, with that Christmas-elf 3-way sex as the centerpiece of the final scene in the movie and the title of the movie distantly connected to the Christmas carol in Latin, Adeste Fideles; and Festoonus (celebrated at my house with that Korean feast)
— 12/23/23: Last day of Saturnalia; and Festivus
— 12/24/23: Fourth Sunday of Advent; and Christmas Eve (finally, two well-known holidays — though how Christmas Eve is celebrated varies enormously)
Notes on the first two days, on which fall four occasions of minor rank (at least in the modern world).
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Posted in Clothing, Costumes, Gay porn, Hats, Holidays, Italian, Korean, Language and food, Latin, Lexical semantics, Music, Myths, Puns, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
December 6, 2023
Today (12/6: St. Nicholas Day, Finnish Independence Day, and Mozart’s death day) my morning name was the Italian phrase dalla sua pace ‘on his / her peace’. From a Mozart opera. The music playing on my Apple Music when I awoke was indeed from opera in Italian, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, so if the phrase had come from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro — Figaro being the barber in question — the appearance of that phrase in my morning mind would have been easy to explain. Alas, Dalla sua pace (On her peace) is an aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, quite a different plot, entirely barber-free and Figaro-free.
It is, of course, possible that my unconscious mind is not as up on the details of opera in Italian as my conscious mind, so it made this distant operatic association. Or maybe I was just reviving an interest in the preposizioni articolate ‘articulated (i.e., articled / arthrous) prepositions’ of Italian, of which dalla — combining the versatile preposition da (expressing source ‘from’, location ‘at, on’, and goal ‘to’) with the fem.sg. definite article la — is a prime example; here it is in a display of the articled prepositions (versions of this chart are found on many sites):
Prepositions down on the left, definite articles across at the top
(Articled prepositions are found in many European languages, as in French du = de ‘of’ + le (masc.sg.) and German zur = zu ‘to, towards’ + der (dat.fem.sg.), with very different details in each language.)
But the aria from Don Giovanni, what of that?
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Posted in French, German, Holidays, Italian, Morning names, Morphology and syntax, Morphophonology, Music, Quotations | 2 Comments »
August 17, 2022
Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, at the grocery store:
(#1) Wayno’s title: Joint Replacement (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
So: let’s start with elbow macaroni and go on from there.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Categorization and Labeling, Constituency, Italian, Language and food, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, My life, Names, Naming, Parsing, Syntax, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
