Italians rank ugliest English words

tauringhuang.

Tue, 09/09/2008 - 3:24pm
The Dante Alighieri Society -- the Italian equivalent of the supremely uptight Academie Francaise -- has produced a list of the ugliest anglicisms that have infected Italian speech in recent years:

The results judge the ugliest imports to be 'weekend', 'welfare' and 'OK', followed by 'briefing', 'mission', 'know how', 'shampoo' and 'cool'.

The worlds of business and politics contribute many of the alien words, from 'question time' to 'premier' and 'bipartisan'.

Apparently this trend has become quite a problem:

Italians increasingly sprinkle their conversations with English terms, some of them comically mangled and bizarre sounding to a native English speaker.

'Baby parking', for example, is a strange conflation which means child care centre or nursery. A 'baby gang', on the other hand, is a more sinister construct. It means a group of young criminals or hoodlums.

As with the French and their use of Franglais, Italians sometimes throw in English words to appear worldly and cosmopolitan, and at other times to describe things slightly alien to the Italian mindset, from 'il fitness' to 'il full immersion training'.

tauringhuang.

I don't speak Italian but I can imagine that "il fitness" would be pretty grating. My favorite anglicism from my admittedly limited language study has to be the Russian word "biznismen" and its even weirder feminine version, "biznismenka".

But is "weekend" really that bad? It was good enough for Jean-Luc Godard, after all.