In the Leg

By Patricia Winton

A few years ago, a man trying to convince me to give a class I didn’t want to teach for less money than I wanted to earn, said, “Ma sei in gamba, tu.” I didn’t understand the expression. Literally, it means “but you’re in the leg,” so I knew I was in uncharted territory. The flatterer trying to urge me to accept his proposal, as it were, said it meant, “you’re an expert” or “you’re good at what you do.” I was skeptical, so I asked other people about the phrase.

One man said he might tell a woman that she’s pretty, sweet, and definitely “in gamba.” That might mean she’s smart but also goes a step farther, as in she’s on the ball or on top of things.

A student described her grandmother as 75 years old but still in gamba. That means, I think, that she still has all her marbles. My student was uncertain. Bilie, the word for marbles, didn’t compute for her. “Ah,” she said at last. “Ha tutte le sue rotelle.” That means she has all her castors (wheels on the bottom of rolling chairs). A perfect match. But, we determined, to be in gamba could refer to a physical as well as mental state. Therefore, her grandmother could still be “spry” or “alive and kicking.” By the same token, you could say I feel in gamba like a twenty-year-old to mean I feel as active and alert as a twenty-year-old. The origin of the phrase may come from describing someone’s state of health: he’s been sick in bed, but now he’s in gamba (he’s on his leg or he’s out of bed).

One woman said she’s looking for un uomo in gamba (a man in the leg). That means she’s looking for a man who would make a good husband. “There are lots of men out there,” she said, “who are handsome and fun to spend time with, but who are definitely not in gamba.” She wouldn’t marry one of them.

Another friend told me that Italians often use in gamba to offer encouragement. For example, if someone is going through a bad time or facing a difficult challenge, a friend might offer “mi raccomando…in gamba.” It would mean, “hang in there” or “chin up.”

Mi raccomando is a whole nother expression with endless meanings. A reflexive form of the verb raccomandare (to recommend), it is often used alone, as in mi raccomando. If someone is facing a challenge or a test, you might say “mi raccomando:” good luck, or I’m rooting for you. It could also mean “Do your best.”

Sometimes, it can mean “please.” Be careful, mi raccomando (be careful, please). In fact, it would mean “Do be careful, please,” for emphasis. Or it can mean, I beg you, mi raccmando a te non farlo—I beg you not to do it.

I didn’t teach that class, but I learned something from the negotiation.

Please join me at Italian Intrigues on alternate Thursdays where I write about all things Italian. Next week, guest blogger Estelle Jobson, who blogged for us here on Novel Adventurers earlier this year, joins me to share an excerpt  from her new book, Finding Rome on the Map of Love.

A Linguistic Marriage

It’s fascinating how words move from one language to another. Why and how they move can be enlightening and often down right funny. English and Italian have a close relationship even though English is not classified as a Latin-based language. The connection comes in part from the years that Julius Caesar and his troops spent on the British Isles.

Take the word tooth, for example. It comes to us from Old English, but the Italian, dente, comes from Latin. From that root in English we have dentist, dental, dentifrice, etc. Likewise, the word hard in English is duro in Italian. It’s Latin root gives us durable, duration, duress, and endure.

English speakers learning Italian and Italians learning English have to be wary of “false friends,” words that appear to be the same, but aren’t. In Italian, the word for farm is fattoria; many Italian students of English think fattoria is factory. Other examples are more confusing: sensibile in Italian means sensitive. A sensible person in Italian is described as being di buonsenso. And if you want to order prosciutto without preservatives, say senza conservante because preservativo means condom.

In general, Italians love to use English words, but they often get them wrong. Last year on my other blog, Italian Intrigues, I wrote a piece about the Titty Bar. It’s not topless; in fact, the name is intended to conjure up a warm, family feeling. In this case, the name has as much to do with pronunciation as meaning. But it makes English speakers smile.

Often, an English word migrates into Italian to perform one narrowly defined task. Take chat, for example. Italian has a perfectly good word, chiacchierata, that is virtually equal in meaning to the English word. When the practice of Internet chat emerged, the English word was adopted, but only for Internet chat. Thus when someone says to me, “I was chatting with my friends,” I have a mental image of people talking face to face while they mean keyboard to keyboard.

Piercing and lifting are two other words that have narrow meanings in Italian. The first is body piercing, the second a face lift (or beauty products purported to have face lift properties). I once helped an Italian jewelry designer develop a presentation about her work in English. She had designed a line of gold jewelry in which the metal had been pierced to make intricate designs. She refused to believe that pierce was the correct word, and even after I showed her in the bilingual dictionary, her preconceived reaction to the word made it impossible for her to use it. We had to find another, more complex, way of describing her work.

Italians immigrating to America developed a slang that combined their own language with the new one. A classic example is Dean Martin singing about pasta fazool in “That’s Amore.” He was singing about an Italian dish called pasta e fagiole (pasta and beans).

Image from Western Connecticut State University

In Italian, a photographic camera is a macchina fotografica. Simple. Descriptive. But how we English speakers came to use camera for the same mechanism is quite interesting. It’s the Italian word for room. Camera di letto, bedroom; camera di pranzo, dining room. So how did camera come to mean macchina fotografica in English?

Before the invention of film, artists could record images by constructing a “room” outside, known as a camera obscura, dark room. Light passing through a small hole was reflected onto the opposite wall. It was upside down, but it maintained perspective. Artists could then trace the reflected image for an accurate record of the scene. Later, a box with mirrors to reverse the image was constructed, and the camera as we know it was born.

Know of any other languages that play tricks on your comprehension?