Big Birds and Bad Words
When headlines make us laugh for once, and does speaking a second language make you better at puns?
I returned to Rome following three weeks of below-freezing temperatures and near daily bad news in New York and across the United States.
The headlines in Rome offered a welcome reprieve, a light in the dark and something scandalous and ridiculous to balance out all that heaviness. Read at your own risk.
In short (…not short anymore), one of Rome’s two rival football (soccer) teams, Lazio, has a falcon mascot. Naturally, there’s also an appointed falconer, to handle the large bird.
Allegedly, the falconer was recently fired for sharing explicit photographs of his genitals following a penile implant.
I read the headline first in Italian, and I couldn’t help but giggle. If you speak Italian and you know even a handful of naughty slang, you’re probably laughing too.
Native speakers, on the other hand, might not get joke. At least not at first.
What’s so Funny?
Sometimes, the joys and challenges are one and the same when adopting a second language.
One of the greatest hurdles is learning to shed those microseconds of mental translation. After all, language fluency is fluid. It flows.
Once we’ve forged new neural pathways that allow us to think, speak, and even dream effortlessly in a second language, what happens to the brain space we once used for semi-simultaneous translation?
Word Play
My money is on puns.
I’m no neurobiologist, but as second-language speakers we’re used to pondering words, even for a split second.
Puns are jokes that exploit multiple definitions of the same word. It makes sense that when speaking a second language, we don’t stop to translate, but rather shuffle a deck of definitions in our heads.
This is partially explained by my word-nerdy nature, but I see a lot of missed opportunities in headlines like this one.
When I read about the falcon, which is a bird (uccello in Italian), more specifically, an uccellone, and a big bird and a penile implant… it struck me immediately. Add to that, a falconer, who handles ‘big birds’ professionally.
Sex-y Slang
Italians have dozens of slang words for both male and female genitalia.
Some of them are based on shape and appearance like mussels, salsiccia and sword.
The fruit category includes strawberries, potatoes, peas, bananas and mushrooms.
Others have an animal origin like shark proboscis (elephant trunk), or as in our case, bird.
We have a similar slang in English if you think about it for a minute…the common cock isn’t nearly as majestic as the eagle, but they’re both big birds. On that note, did the creators of Sesame Street realize what they were doing? The Black Cock of Chianti is not in on the joke either.
Either way, in the grand tradition of the New York Post the Lazio Falconer headline played in my head a million different ways.
Most importantly, it made me laugh amid an onslaught of tragic news. That’s what I call, balanced reporting.