awed-frog:

Hi there! It is, indeed, not possible to answer a question like that. In Italian there is a whole series of happy little words like cincischiare (loaf around, procrastinate) or fuffa (unimportant gossip or cheap merchandise) and wonderful Latin constructs like inscrutabile (literally, that cannot be looked at properly) and ineffabile (that cannot be said), not to mention the eyebrow-raising libridinoso (turned on by books) but what I’m also fascinated by are political neologisms, which tend to be very colourful, mostly short-lived, and often obscure both for language learners and native speakers who forgot to check the news for a couple of hours. Here are a few of them.

Benaltrismo – Substantivisation of the expression ben altri (‘most definitely other’) as used in sentences like, Sono ben altri i problemi del paese (‘The country has far more important issues to discuss’). It describes a transparent, but efficient, rhetorical trick used to imply that the subject at hand is frivolous or unimportant and one should focus on more urgent matters.

Bunga bunga – Look, I don’t even know. Legend says the term comes from a dirty joke Gaddafi, of all people, once told Berlusconi. It has come to mean ‘an orgy involving a powerful leader’ and the fact we need the term at all should shame the entire country into never talking to anyone again.

Celodurismo – This is a relatively old political term and probably tells you everything you need to know about the party who’s about to rule half of Italy. In the 90s, one of the most popular slogan of far right Lega Nord was La Lega ce l’ha duro (‘Lega is fully hard’ or something like that), hence the term, which should convey the idea of an aggressive, uncompromising, non PC and all round masculine way of doing politics.

Inciucio – Originally a Neapolitan word meaning ‘gossip’, inciucio has been promoted to be a synonym of another wonderful word, intrallazzo, and it now means ‘political intrigue, dishonest manoeuvre’. 

Odiocrazia – ‘Hateocracy’, ie a political ideology dominated by the opposition to, and hatred towards, the other parties. Amazingly, this has been around since 2008, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone actually use it. 

Tesoretto – Literally ‘small treasure’, but it actually means ‘extra tax revenues’. And by the way, this is actually one of my pet peeves – the woobification of serious words, and what the hell – tesoretto here and tesoretto there and it looks like you’re talking about Smurfs or something, and what’s even worse is furbetto – furbo is already a weird, almost pejorative word in Italian, but furbetto – which, until recently, was only used to describe children who misbehaved – is a word we now use to describe grown-ass people committing actual crimes, and ugh.

Vaffa Day or V-Day – Back in 2007, comedian Beppe Grillo invited people to mobilize in a ‘Fuck Them Day’ to support a new kind of Parliament: people turned up to sign so that MPs could only complete two terms of office and that they could be elected only if they were more or less honest. The initiative was a huge success, and it’s almost bittersweet to think of it now that Grillo’s own party has been exposed as just another nest of power-grabbing, corrupt and self-serving dickbags. Life, eh?

Webete – From web and ebete (‘idiot’), not exactly a political term but a word invented by exasperated journalist Enrico Mentana to shut up the self-appointed experts who plagued his Facebook posts. A related term is leone da tastiera (‘keyboard lion’), which means something like ‘cyberbully’ (according to Wikipedia: ‘a person who targets, offends or threatens others with the goal of discrediting them’). This new idea that everyone’s opinion is equally valid has descended upon the country like a plague, and the fierce debates it left in its wake, most famously about vaccines, prompted a doctor to declare that ‘science is not a democracy’. The new government, however, seems likely to disagree.

(If you speak Italian, this is an interesting article about the evolution of the political language in Italy.)