RSS
The Ugliest English Words, According to the Italians
Language purists think that English is a weed that keeps on popping up in the linguistic garden that is their native tongue. Take for instance, the Italians:
From ‘il weekend’ to ‘lo stress’ and ‘le leadership’, Italians increasingly sprinkle their conversations with English terms, some of them comically mangled and bizarre sounding to a native English speaker. [...]
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’.
But now the Dante Alighieri Society, the cultural guardian of Italy, wanted the "Anglitaliano" to stop. Their first step was to determine the ugliest English words that had infected lingua Italiana:
Over the last four months the society, named after the Florentine poet Dante, author of The Divine Comedy and regarded as the father of the Italian language, asked visitors to its website to nominate their least favourite Anglicisms.
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’.
Athon
Pol x
Max Power
Nero
TwoDragons
LisaL
Neatoramawontsendmeapassword
ted
Orjan Morjan
Granturista
