Thursday, September 20, 2007

Ugly pretty words

Category: Mood, music
Phrase: "Abastanza bene"
Does not mean: "super duper good"
Actually means: Well enough. Good.
Our roommate would walk around the apartment energetically exclaiming this phrase. It was her word; she believed it was a happy response to "how are you?" and it would put a smile to our faces everytime we heard it.
However, the next week in Italian class, we learned that it actually meant the much more tepid and unenthusiastic "good." Let's not make that mistake. Just because a word sounds happy, it does not mean it perpetrates that emotion. The word "diarrhea" was voted the prettiest sounding word in the English dictionary a while back. You get the idea.

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