Words – Neapolitan Dialect Of The World

The words of the ancient Neapolitan. The past remembers the future.

Neapolitan is also a “language in the language”. There are many words of the Neapolitan dialect that are no longer used today. Words that our grandparents used, which once bothered us because they seemed vulgar. We are missing the same words today because they found our identity.

When we were young these words of the past were rough in our ears and we made fun of those who used them. For example, I remember the word Muccaturo which in Italian means handkerchief. This word comes from the Catalan mocador and also from the French mouchoir. The Muccaturo empirically makes the sense of dirt, of that dirt that comes out of your nose. The rheum you emit when you sneeze end up right there, in the cotton handkerchief that was kept in the coat pocket and washed only when it had become unusable. To me the image of the muccaturo was really annoying and I remember that when I was a child it scared me, because I didn’t know how to use it when I had a cold. But it is also true that it was of great help to me, because the tissue (the clinex) irritated my child’s skin. The muccaturo was really useful, practical, perhaps unhygienic but safe and faithful. Today in Naples nobody talks about it. The handkerchief is called ‘o fazzuletto (from italian: fazzoletto) and almost all citizens use the paper handkerchief.

Another word that is part of the old Neapolitan is Crisommola, which in Italian means apricot. Crisommola derives from the Greek χρυσοῦν μῆλον (chrysoûn mêlon = golden fruit), and it is a really strange way to call a fruit. The crisommola is perhaps one of the most beautiful fruits. Sweet, orange, tender and soft. Yet the Neapolitans called it this word, difficult to pronounce and annoying to the ears. Today nobody uses the word crisommola. Almost everyone in Naples says “Albicocc” (from Italian Albicocca). It may happen that some greengrocers want to clarify the terminology, specifying that what they are selling you is just a kilo of crisommola. I’ve always made confusion between orange and apricot. Because in Naples the apricot is called crisommola and the orange purtuall (in the past in Naples the oranges were mainly imported from Portugal). And at lunch and dinner almost all my family corrected me because I did not know how to distinguish between the two fruits. I admit that even today I am very confused and tend to never use these two words. Yet crisommola and purtuallo make better the sense of origin, the roots of the words of the Neapolitan language.

Another old word that always made me smile is Mustacce (which in Italian means baffi ) and derives from the Byzantine Greek moustákion and the French moustache. In Naples, the Mustacce are those very thick baffi, the ones that used people in the 1800s and that made a man a real man. All the men in the old portraits and photos have the “mustacce” and those same men were proud to wear them. Today the Mustacce are confused with the beard and represent a single image of masculinity.

Having mustaches meant being grown up, going from childhood to adolescence.

An adult man absolutely had to have mustaches.

Why is it so important to remember the words of the past? Those words make our story and also help us to understand the present.

It is always said that the past was a better place than the present. I can’t say if this statement is correct but I definitely know that Neapolitan cannot be a language that belongs only to the present. The Neapolitan is the past that always returns, the future that calls the past, the present that exists only thanks to what has been and what will be.

From the Anglo-American Strike a pose to the neapolitan Se spara e pose

If you speak in Neapolitan you have to ironize about something.

After World War II, American troops settled particularly in southern Italy. And from this settlement they were born mixtures and attractions of various kinds. American civilization was really different for the Neapolitan people: too modern in language, too futuristic in lifestyle. Yet the Americans relied well on Napoli, many soldiers found a new home, some even love, others a simple refuge from the horrors of war. Unlike most of the xenophile words that are part of the Neapolitan language, the Anglo-American words have been incorporated into our speech through a transformation of meaning. Among all the ways of speaking in my language, there is one that amuses and makes us think.

When in Napoli a person is showing off too much it is said that “se spara ‘e pose” (si dà le arie, in Italian language). And when you tell someone that “se spara ‘e pose”, you mean that the person to whom you are referring to it’s really exaggerating in the ways. Therefore the Neapolitan citizens assert this sentence with conviction, in order to diminish the excess of boast from his interlocutor.

When an Italian wants to take a beautiful photograph, he is said to be posing. In the English-speaking language, instead, to create a beautiful photo it says “Strike a pose!” that means really, to pose. If we isolate the word strike from the rest of the sentence, we notice that the verb to strike means precisely “to shoot” in a decisive way. Here is where the Neapolitan phrase “Se spara ‘e pose” comes from. This is like a play on words.

As we have already said, irony is the basis of the Neapolitan language. And it is probable that whenever the Neapolitans listened to the Americans say “Strike a pose”, they did not understand what they were really saying or that this way of saying made them laugh.

To better convey the meaning of the Neapolitan ironic phrase, we can cite the scene of a critically acclaimed movie based in the suburbs of Naples. The movie is Io speriamo che me la cavo, by the movie director Lina Wertmüller.

The scene is set in a school in the poorest suburbs of Naples. The teacher asks his students to name the street in which they live. And one of the children claims to live in “via Garibaldi” (Garibaldi street) and to know everything about the historical character Giuseppe Garibaldi. Feeling in competition with his classmate, a child from the front desk shouts to the teacher: “Ma quale via Garibaldi… Se spara ‘e pose, si dà le arie. Quello abita nella via delle tre galline”( Garibaldi street what? This is not true… he’s showing off! He lives in the street of the three hens).

Paolo Villaggio in the scene mentioned before.

With one sentence the poor child ironizes about his friend’s condition and downgrades his image.

The irony of Neapolitan language is powerful mostly in this strategy. Laughing and making people laugh about their own or others’ condition.