A common noun with a dual meaning in Italian is tenda, which can be translated as either curtain (or drapes in US English) or tent depending on the context. Let’s discover it now! tenda curtain / tent The word derives from the Medieval Latin word tenda. It is a derivative of the Latin verb tendĕre, …
Proprio is one of those sneaky little Italian words that seems to pop up everywhere. In fact, I don’t think five minutes ever go by without me slipping a proprio into one of my sentences. Its sheer ubiquity, in addition to the fact that it can function as an adjective, adverb, pronoun, and noun, is …
Some Italian words look unmistakably Italian: just think of casa, mangiare, bellissimo. What makes them look Italian? Well, they all end in a vowel, for one! Other words, however, can catch you totally off guard because they don’t seem particularly Italian at all. Sometimes they even look more like English, French, or, as in the …
Lately, I have found myself dealing with “brain fog” more often than I would like to admit. We all know that la vita (life) has a funny way of piling things on, be that due to work responsibilities, bringing up kids, daily worries and decisions, and of course expectations which may or may not even …
There are a few “mild” Italian curse words that I would happily use in front of mia suocera (my mother-in-law) without feeling the slightest bit guilty, and mannaggia is definitely one of them! mannaggia darn / shoot / blast Mannaggia is an exclamation, or more specifically an interjection, used when someone is being annoying or …
I’ve never really understood why mothers-in-law get such a bad rap. Whilst living in Torino, my suocera gave me a place to live when I wasn’t earning enough to rent my own apartment, cooked for me when I got home late from work in the evening, and I would even say that she was solely …