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Title: Merda!: The Real Italian You Were Never Taught in School by Roland Delicio, Kim Wilson Eversz ISBN: 0-452-27039-1 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: November, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.33 (9 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Not quite merda
Comment: I'll stop short of writing that Merda is a piece of merda, but it is a wasted opportunity.
Italian slang -- especially the kind of colorful slang this book focuses on -- has its roots in history and tradition, and it gives insight into the psychology of a people. It can be very vulgar, but it is also symbolic, metaphoric, and at times even poetic (albeit in a crude way). But instead of focusing on that, Merda is content to be little more than a list of ways to accuse someone of practicing the world's oldest profession, and new methods to refer to defecation in every day conversation. Instead of using insight, it relies on shock value.
Sadly, it also confuses some regional phrases with true Italian, and there are more than a handful of translation errors.
It is true that much of the information contained on the book's pages is difficult to come across without hanging out with i ragazzi after dusk on a street corner in Naples, but it could have been so much more.
Combine those fatal shortcomings with poor quality given its price (it's produced using newsprint between two flimsy covers), and you end up with a product with little to recommend it.
Rating: 4
Summary: Very useful, very amusing, very racy!
Comment: This book is NOT to be left in the presence of minors and/or elders who's wrath you don't wish to incur.
Chock full of epithets dealing with bodily functions and fluids, as well as dialogue that would make a hardened sailor blush, this book relentlessly and humourously fills the gaps that formal language instruction leaves out of slang. It also gives insight into the world-reknowned Italian ability to sweetly insult someone within an inch of their life without uttering a single word that would get one into trouble in the most formal of company.
Highly recommended, but don't read this when you're eating. :)
Rating: 4
Summary: Absolute Fun
Comment: If you are an Italian American like myself, this book will clue you in to some of those 'mystery' phrases your mom murmured between her teeth as she chased a misbehaving you around the kitchen table with her wooden spoon.
Okay---some of the choice expressions in this volume would never have passed between my mother's lips, but nonetheless, the book while sometimes crude, is meant to be an irreverant tome of pure fun.
Take it as such and you will find yourself laughing at its sheer audacity! If anything, it deciphers some of 'the Soprano's' saucier interjections!
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Title: Dictionary of Italian Slang and Colloquial Expressions by Daniela Gobetti ISBN: 0764104322 Publisher: Barrons Educational Series Pub. Date: February, 1999 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Wicked Italian by Harold Tomb, Howard Tomb, Jared Lee ISBN: 0894806173 Publisher: Workman Publishing Company Pub. Date: September, 1989 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: Street Italian 2: The Best of Naughty Italian by David Burke ISBN: 0471384399 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 21 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Italian Without Words by Don Cangelosi, Joseph Delli Carpini, Joe D. Carpini ISBN: 0671677438 Publisher: Meadowbrook Pub. Date: June, 1989 List Price(USD): $6.00 |
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Title: Street Italian 1 : The Best of Italian Slang by David Burke ISBN: 0471384380 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 28 July, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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