Ma che è ‘stu papièllo?… What is this papièllo?
A typical phrase of the Neapolitans who find themselves having to read a document full of words difficult to understand. The Papièllo, in fact, in Neapolitan means mainly “document”. It derives from two foreign words: from the Spanish “Papel” and from the French “Papier”. Both words mean, in their respective languages, paper. And Paper is also intended as a document.
But the papièllo in Neapolitan is not only a written document. It can also be only oral.
It can be, for example, a wording on an ancient building, perhaps in Latin. Or a set of information, a decalogue of rules posted inside a civil building. In short, for the Neapolitan the papièllo is something to read or to say that it is really long.
By this we do not mean that Neapolitans do not like to read, on the contrary they will be happy to read a papièllo, provided that they are given the opportunity to make irony.
We know, at this point, that Neapolitan language needs to irony everything. It has to do it to play down, to make a conversation nice and above all to put the interlocutor at ease. To be ironic about something or a situation makes the situation itself lived in a way to read.
So, when a Neapolitan has to read a very long document, then, he announces to the listeners, or even to himself, that that document is a papièllo. Thus he uses the word papièllo to play down and say aloud: “We are ready to face a boring, long but necessary reading”.
But the papièllo can also appear in an informal, family conversations that do not concern official documents. For example, if a child of a Neapolitan family writes a letter to his grandfather for his grandparents’ party or for Christmas, it may happen that he becomes an object of irony on the part of his family. Let’s take an example. It’s Christmas and Carmine, a Neapolitan child, wrote a nice letter for his grandparents to thank them for the gift they made him find under the Christmas tree. The boy puts the letter under his grandfather’s pasta dish and, as soon as all the family members sit at the table, he says to his grandfather: “Look what’s under your plate”. Grandfather will find his grandson’s letter and start reading it. At that moment he will say in front of everyone: “Let’s read this little papièllo who wrote Carmine”. But he will say that in an ironic and above all affectionate sense, because he knows that his grandson is good at school and has written a long but full of love letter.
Let’s take another example. A Neapolitan husband is sent by his wife to do the shopping. The woman wrote her shopping list on a sheet of paper. When the man arrives at the supermarket, he unrolls the sheet and realizes that the list is really long. Then he approaches the shop assistant and asks him, in an almost desperate and compliant tone: “Can you help me, please? My wife gave me the shopping list but it’s a papièllo and I don’t understand anything.”
When the husband returns home, he will probably fight with his wife for forgetting to buy something. And the husband will justify himself by saying: “You gave me to buy a papièllo di roba, “too much stuff” (in this case the word papièllo is accompanied by the word roba, which means stuff), how could I remember everything?”.
So here we go from the irony to the apology. Using words that indicate exaggerated situations can also become, in the Neapolitan language, a form of personal apology for claiming that you are unable to complete a task but certainly not because of an improper fault.
Neapolitan Dialect Of The World 