Word: sicilian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...said in tears. "I love you papà." It would have been a touching farewell, if not for the fact that 32-year-old Sandro Lo Piccolo is a convicted murderer - and the dad he was being torn away from is the most wanted boss in the ever-powerful Sicilian Mafia. Top boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo and his son were captured together Monday morning in a small hamlet outside of Palermo in Sicily, a bust immediately hailed as a major victory for the Italian state in its ongoing battle against organized crime. Lo Piccolo, 65, was considered the unrivaled leader...
...directly from Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Did I mention that Frank Lucas is black? Throughout the story, Lucas’s race plays a significant role in the NYPD’s unwillingness to recognize him as a true threat to the war on drugs and the Sicilian Mafia’s unwillingness to recognize him as a true competitor in the business of organized crime. Ever the clever opportunist, Lucas uses society’s disparaging notions of African-American intelligence and strength to operate below the radar and ultimately manipulate those parties who assumed him powerless...
...traced to 1991, when he simply slapped the green Benetton logo on a photojournalist's award-winning image of a dying AIDS patient surrounded by his family. Since then, the son of a renowned Milan photojournalist has snapped his own striking frames of Balkan war victims, children from a Sicilian Mafia town and death-row inmates, the last of which set off widespread anger in the United States and eventually lead to his split with Benetton...
...deconstruct the exact significance of what is affectionately abbreviated as "vaffa" when the irritation is a bit less extreme. It is an expression that has survived in one dialect form or another down generations of Italy's millions of emigrants around the world (it is known by its Sicilian variant in the U.S. va fangul, popularized on the hit HBO series The Sopranos), alongside more wholesome words and concepts like prosciutto, mamma and amore...
...they have lost their original obscene and/or overtly hostile significance, even while "impoverishing language and manners." The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that "obscene" speech does not enjoy First Amendment protection, and may in certain cases be criminal to express. Still, at least one of the nine U.S. justices, Sicilian-American Antonin Scalia, has some personal experience to work from. Last year when a reporter asked what he had to say to his critics, the brilliant judge responded: "I say "Vaffanculo!" If it is indeed a question of context, let the record show that Scalia had a big smile...