Word: sicilian
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...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...
Robert Kennedy's crusade against the lesser-known Marcello, whose Mob territory embraced Texas, was almost as intense. Born in Tunisia of Sicilian parents who moved to the U.S. in 1910, Marcello later used a phony Guatemalan birth registration to avoid deportation to Italy. Fully aware that Marcello was not a Guatemalan, Kennedy in 1961 nevertheless had Immigration agents hustle him aboard a 78-seat jet as its lone passenger and deposit him in Guatemala City. Marcello and his American lawyer were later flown to El Salvador, where soldiers dumped the two expensively dressed men in the mountains. Marcello claimed...
...Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage. Most everybody who's Italian is half Italian. Except me. I'm all Italian. I'm mostly Sicilian, and I have a little bit of Neapolitan in me. You get your full dose with...