Mincing
Words With Smoke and Ash
We recently visited our local IKEA. Although still some distance from us, by “local”
I mean here, confined to the USA. Every so
often, it’s fun to follow the arrows on their showroom floor, room to room,
through their maze of displays. It brought
back memories of the IKEAs in Italy where we’ve purchased a good share of the
items that fill our home in that beautiful corner of Italy called Calitri. Seeking contentment through familiarity,
IKEAs in the US and Italy are laid out exactly alike. I’m guessing they are all alike. We’ve been to quite a few over the years,
beginning with one in Florence. I recall
those early days when although we knew there were some in our region of Campania,
we couldn’t get people to understand us when we asked where IKEA was located. It was because of the way I was pronouncing
it. The “I” of Eye-Key-ah was putting
the local Italians off because the vowel “I” in Italian is pronounced “E”, making
it E-Kay-ah.” “Oh, vuoi dire E-Key-ah!”
(Oh, you mean Ikea!). Just what was to
us a minor shift in pronunciation made our request totally unintelligible until
I wrote it out. It is much like how an
errant comma in a computer’s code could cause a probe to miss the moon. With slip-ups like this, there’s no telling what
I may have been saying at other times. I
guess I was truly mincing words.
As I roam from correct pronunciation using
stitched together words and turns of phrase, I’ve no
qualms about losing face making mistakes.
It seems I have no reticence over making such gaffes as I verbally slobber
all over myself with not only incorrect pronunciation, but word choice as well. Thankfully, some clarity eventually appears. Instead of a rapid-fire salvo of “Ciao, Ciao,
Ciao” on arriving or departing, I’ve learned to hold them back and use salve
(hello), buongiorno (good morning), or arrivederci (good-bye). Unlike me, many are unwilling to risk making
mistakes. They are reluctant to open
their mouths and attempt a simple sentence for fear, beyond the complexities of
the vocabulary, that they might fumble over perfect pronunciation, complex
tense forms, or thorny gender selection. Folks have told me, however, that my attempts,
nascent as they are, please them for the mere fact that I try.
Italian is arguably the most beautiful and
melodic language in the world. To speak
it, any language for that matter, is a process of trial, error, and occasional
funny moments when someone slips up by using the wrong word or pronounces
something in an incomprehensible manner. But there is some help getting it right. I’ve heard for instance that any word in
English ending in “ion” is easily pronounced in Italian by adding an “e” to its
ending. Seems to work. Thus “constitution” becomes “costituzione”
and “tradition” becomes “tradizione.”
Pretty much sounds the same although syllable emphasis is often different
but not enough for you not to be understood.
It has worked to instantly increase my Italian vocabulary by hundreds of
words. Some missteps, like my fumble
over IKEA, beyond generating a laugh, can lead to trouble when similar sounding
words have totally different meanings.
Going the other way, listening can be just as tricky. Words that resemble each other, especially
when they sound alike in both languages, can and often mean something
completely different and provide an opportunity for major gaffes. To make this point, in the movie, “Under
the Tuscan Sun” the word “celibe” is used in dinner conversation
when Frances (actress Diane Lane) is asked whether she is “celibe” by a handsome
Italian gentleman seated beside her. She
makes the obvious jump, thinking he was asking her if she was “celibate”, as in
sexual abstinence. Quite a few meanings
removed, he was actually asking her if she was single, as in unmarried. That got a laugh out of me back in 2003 and
imprinted in me not to ever make that mistake.
Here is another example of close but not exact and definitely far from
correct. Can you guess what the Italian
word preservativi (pre-zer-vah-t-vee)
means? Well, I can assure you it has nothing
to do with safeguarding something or even breakfast jellies and jams. It actually translates to condoms! Talk about stepping on a landmine. And I won’t even try to describe the
consequences of how just changing the “o” in the Italian word for fig to an
“a” can prove catastrophic when in this case all you wanted was some jam for
your toast. That is an embarrassing way
to learn a language, surely not part of your Rosetta Stone or Babble subscription. I doubt there’d be any laughter over that foul-up.
Foot-in-the-mouth faux pas, in this case
spoken totally correct, also extend to food etiquette. Take for instance asking for parmesan cheese
to put on a fish or seafood pasta dish or ordering a cappuccino well into the
afternoon or with an evening meal (some say the cutoff is 10 a.m.). Yet many times, putting the proverbial foot
in your mouth is part of the learning process.
After all, we learn from our mistakes.
Wasn’t it Tom Edison who said, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” In the case of language though, 10,000
times might be fairly excessive. With
pronunciation at least, Tom’s dawning light bulb of realization for getting it
right ought to go on well before that.
I have a good ear, so repeating the sound with
the proper intonation, syllable cadence, and rolling those R’s with the proper inflection
is not difficult. The hard part is remembering
the words and especially those troublesome verb constructs. At this point, it is doubtful I have much room
in my head for another language dictionary; Recalling the one already built
into me, English, is hard enough. I attribute
this inability to my age and that processor called a brain. My ram memory for quick recall isn’t so fast
anymore and has grown somewhat volatile, dropping things here, there, everywhere,
while my brain’s hard drive wobbles and skips from continual overwrites.
Yet, while
there are words and confusion over them as I’ve mentioned, there are also
non-words. From those first Neanderthal
utterances to books full of words today, the terms we use need a spark of invention.
New ones, so new my spellchecker doesn’t
recognize them, like, “elbow-bump,” “unfathom,” “zoodle,” along with many
others, are annually given the Merriam-Webster stamp of approval. But way back, pre-alphabet and pre the advent
of books, a mere picture would suffice to record what would eventually become a
word. One such image word was what we
now refer to as a volcano.
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| Possible 9,000 Year0old Depiction of an Erupting Volcano |
For both the Greeks and Romans there was no reserved word for a volcano. Their cultures explained volcanoes as the sites of various gods.1 Like so much in their world, they associated volcanic events with godly intrigue. Mountain rumblings were thought to be the tormented cries of imprisoned
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| Snakes Protecting Pompeiians from Vesuvius? |
With the loss of Pompeii, a get-away resort for vacationing
Romans, as well as nearby Ercolano (Herculaneum) in a matter of
hours in 79 AD, Vesuvius achieved lasting fame. Although the area had shared the same fate
1500 years earlier, with fewer people around to relate the happening and no
Pliny the Younger present to record the details, it lacked the notoriety of
equal billing. While they may not have
had a word for it, nonetheless they knew the feeling. Its volcanic flare-ups have grown rather
commonplace, for Vesuvius has erupted hundreds of times. Today it is the only active volcano on
mainland Europe and likely, with over 3 million people nearby, the most
dangerous. With all the attention on the
79 AD eruption, many are unaware that Vesuvius last awoke from its slumber in
March of 1944 at the height of World War II.
It was a stunning surprise to the Allied forces who had invaded Italy
only seven months earlier. Especially
surprised were the airmen of the 340th Bombardment Group who occupied an
airfield only miles from the volcano. Knowing
the history of the place, since many a Pliny the Younger had subsequently weighed in,
they were likely flabbergasted.
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| B-25 Mitchell Bomber |
“Black stones of all
sizes, some as large as a football, fell in great quantity completely covering
the ground, breaking branches from the trees, smashing through the tents to
break up on their floors, tearing through the metal, fabric, and Plexiglas of the
airplanes. Soon all the tents were in tatters with much of their contents
No lives were lost at Poggiomarino, the Pompeii Airdrome, and
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| Look Closely ... is that Nose Wheel Of the Ground? |
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| B-25s Back in Action |
With such pent-up energy, it’s a wonder that no one has exploited the destructive potential of a volcano. Far beyond serving as a geothermal energy source, why not use it as a weapon and let it all out? While a volcano has never been weaponized, the thought is rumored to have been broached. It was allegedly suggested as a Nazi tactic to slow the movement of Allied forces traveling north up the Italian peninsula into the heart of Europe. Whether it represented just “what-if” bar talk or actually had some credibility behind it, isn’t clear. Naples, from Vesuvius all the way around to Sophia Loren’s hometown of Pozzoli, close to the coast on the northern shore of the Bay of Naples, then to today floats atop a sea of molten magma. It was an area well known to the Romans as the Agri Phlegraea (Phlegraean Fields), today an active area of boiling mud and gaseous emission. It lies close to the Solfatara crater, the mythological home of the Roman god of fire, Vulcan.
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| Vesuvius Dominates the Naples Skyline |
Neapolitans by nature are a superstitious lot. Much like their ancestors, they look for signs and omens of what lies ahead. Instead of an augur’s prophecy or the inspection of the entrails of sacrificial animals, they offer prays and appeal to saints today. Case in point: Three times a year, the first Saturday in May, a particular saint’s feast day in September, and again on 16 December (the anniversary of the 1631 massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius), Neapolitans gather at the cathedral in the center of Naples to witness the miracle of San Gennaro (St. Januarius). During the fourth century, Gennaro was an archbishop who was martyred during the Diocletian persecution of Christians. Legend has it that an ampoule of his blood was collected and to this day serves as a religious relic. The blood solidified but didn’t always remain in a solid state. Its state transitions serve what flights of birds and
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| Calitri with the Caldera of Our Extinct Volcano in the Background - Long May She Rest Quietly |
Hopefully, my rambling has not frightened you from ever attempting to speak Italian, visiting the magma spewing Naples area, or the entirety of Italy
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| View of the Extinct Monte Vulture Volcano from Casa Calitri, Our Home in Italy |
Paolo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanology
2. War Diary of the 340th Bombardment Group, March 1944
http://57thbombwing.com/340th_History/340th_Diary/15_March1944.pdf
