{"id":66154,"date":"2024-09-22T13:48:15","date_gmt":"2024-09-22T18:48:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=66154"},"modified":"2024-09-22T14:20:34","modified_gmt":"2024-09-22T19:20:34","slug":"a-fancy-way-to-say-fancy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=66154","title":{"rendered":"\"A fancy way to say 'fancy'\""},"content":{"rendered":"

I was in a Salt Lake City shop called Caputo's that bills itself as a Market and Deli, Purveyors of Regional Italian and Southern European Foods.\u00a0 It reminds me somewhat of the great Di Bruno Bros. in Philly, but more on the \"paisan\"* side (sort of like the South Asian word \"desi\" as used in America to describe a small down-home food shop that caters to folks from the subcontinent).<\/p>\r\n

[*I absolutely love that Italian word!\u00a0 So much depends on the intonation with which you say it.\u00a0 A scholarly disquisition on a more formal set of Italian words for the same idea is the following:<\/p>\r\n

You are probably thinking of the variations of the Italian \u201ccompare\u201d often used in various dialects in the south, particularly cump\u00e0<\/i>\/comp\u00e0<\/i>\u00a0or \u2018mpare<\/i>\/\u2018mbare.\u00a0<\/i><\/span>From Latin \u201ccompater\u201d, formed by \u201ccum\u201d (with) and \u201cpater\u201d (father), which originally referred to the person present with the father at a child\u2019s baptism, the child\u2019s godfather. Over centuries these forms became a common greeting among friends in southern dialects. Since many immigrants from Italy to the US in the early 20th century were from the south and spoke their dialects, cump\u00e0<\/i>\/comp\u00e0<\/i> \/\u2018mpare<\/i>\/\u2018mbare<\/i> became known as Italian-American colloquialisms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

In Italian, naturally\u00a0<\/span>I would say fra<\/i> as in fratello<\/i> (brother). It is very common to shorten the word by cutting off the end and emphasizing the vowel that remains at the end.\u00a0 To say \"hey bro\" in Italian, I would\u00a0use one of these:\u00a0<\/span>\u201cEhi fra…\u201d \u201cOi fra…\u201d \u201cCiao fra…\u201d \u201cEi fra…\u201d<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Another slang term for \u201cbro\u201d or \u201cdude\u201d is \u201czio\u201d (uncle, like Spanish \u201ct\u00edo,\u201d and has the same slang meaning in Spanish too)<\/span><\/p>\r\n

It comes from one of my two favorite New Jersey undergraduate paisans who took my classes a few years ago.]<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n

I was chatting with two of the young staff members at Caputo's and asked them what they thought of a nearby Italian trattoria<\/a>.\u00a0 They said, \"A bit too bijou\".\u00a0 There may have been a final syllable, something like \"-y; -ni\", but I didn't quite catch it, at least not the consonant segment, if there was one.<\/p>\r\n

So I asked them to spell the word, and neither of them could do so.\u00a0 Then I asked them what the word meant, and the girl said \"It's a fancy way to say 'fancy'\", and the guy agreed with her, \"Yeah, it means 'fancy'.\"<\/p>\r\n

I thought that was an interesting way to define a word that their auditor (me) did not have the foggiest idea of what it meant.<\/p>\r\n

After I left Caputo's, I gave a lot of thought to what that word \"bijou'i\" was and its derivation.\u00a0 To tell the truth, from the moment I heard the girl say \"It's a fancy way to say 'fancy'\", I could not help but think of \"bijoux\" (\"jewelry\", something precious; cf. \"bling\").\u00a0 Also, the way these two young Americans said the word and talked about it, for some reason, I couldn't escape thinking that it was Congolese, of whom there are many in the SLC area.\u00a0 I may be completely wrong about this, and it is merely a surmise, but \"bijou'i\" just seemed like a Franco-Dutch Congolese creole word with an American adjectival ending.\u00a0 (Hah!)<\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

Selected readings<\/b><\/p>\r\n