Linguistic purism is nothing new, and it certainly did not begin with Fascism. Under Fascism, however, it took on a distinctly “warlike” character, unsurprisingly, given the wartime climate: we are talking here about the years 1940–1943.
Yet the Futurists, in their remarkable burst of cultural creativity, had already invented Italian replacements for foreign words. There are several kinds of borrowing (specialist territory: don’t worry, not something to get into here), but the most interesting and entertaining replacements, in my opinion, are those that replace a foreign word with an imaginative Italian description of what it means.
Take quisibeve, for example. What on earth is that supposed to designate? A present-day Italian speaker might understand its components, but probably not its intended meaning. And who would want to eat a traidue? Not to mention the sublime peralzarsi! Can anyone guess the English or Italian equivalents?
No Googling! The answers will come in the next article.
Meanwhile, though, the regime was preparing something more institutional and less ridiculous (well, relatively speaking…) than these Futurist inventions: committees and decrees, i.e. bureaucracy in its purest form!
But how did we get from ordering an arlecchino (“cocktail”) to dropping a child off at a “baby parking” while having a treatment at a “beauty farm”?
It would be nice to have a Kumzits (another borrowed word, this time from Yiddish into Hebrew, formed from the words for “come” and “sit”) to talk about this, but unfortunately having a pint online is impossible. Ideally, what we could do now would be to drink an arzente (“cognac”) in the mescita (“bar”) at the Hotel Eden.
There is an interesting anecdote about this name: during this bout of nationalist intoxication, someone believed that the Hotel Eden was named after the then British Foreign Secretary, whose name was indeed Anthony Eden, and therefore called for it to be renamed. Of course, they overlooked the fact that Eden is something completely different…
More (involuntary) fun stuff in the next article!