Way back at the beginning of the second millennium, I was teaching English
at a Florentine school whose floors were as scuffed as their blackboards,
which-originally white-had turned gray with grammar lessons.
The classes were small and the staff was smaller: Karen, a
rainbow-bright gal who had gotten herself hired so she would have a daily
audience to admire her 100-some hat collection; Josh, a good-humored
jean-wearer with a tweed look about him, who loved Latin far more than English;
and me, who liked all languages with equal fervor and taught so I could
amicably oblige students to participate in taxi-driver role-plays and make them
sing ‘My Way’ at the top of their lungs without a bit of alcohol in their
bodies.
The three of us had already lived in Italy longer than most, and we were
far too smart to try for un lavoro fisso,
interminable Italian employment that had you doing the countdown to retirement
before the age of 25. Contrarily, we were not smart enough to land the ridiculous six-figure salaries our
counterparts were earning as dot-commers in the Silicon Valley. Thus, we
counted our hours and horded our lire (yes, lire), quite happy to
console ourselves with the priceless pleasures of helping adults build their
language bridges with clumsy, tumbling words that seemed a lot like nursery
building blocks.
In the staff room, between two-hour time slots, we’d sip watery but
comforting coin-machine cappuccino and concoct secret teacher strategies aimed
at high achievement. Who could set a new record for the number of false friends
collected on a Monday before lunch? And whose list of linguistic slip-ups would
be unanimously voted the funniest? If someone said corpse for ‘body,’ magazine for ‘department store,’ or vacancy instead of vacation, it had to be tallied.
The ‘inevitables’ did not count. Italians have a knack for adverbs, and
there was no use listing the times students tripped on ‘actually,’ ‘definitely’
and ‘eventually.’ Blue-faced teachers cajole and coax: in English, the
translations for attualmente,
definitivamente and eventualmente are, respectively, ‘currently,’ ‘ultimately’ and ‘if necessary.’ Karen,
Josh and I agreed not to include them: keeping those numbers straight would
have been a whole other job and, though giddily amused by our score-keeping, we
shied away from outright obsession.
If your students produced words on the ‘pet peeve’ list, you won extra
points: ‘sensible’ intended as ‘sensitive’ not ‘reasonable’; ‘convenience’ to
mean ‘cheapness’ not ‘accessibility’ and ‘library’ placed where ‘bookshop’
should have been were all in the top 10. If a pupil said ‘parent’ when she
really meant ‘relative,’ it also counted in the peeve category. On one
occasion, that blunder worked a different way: scrounging up a makeshift
translation for genitore, ‘parent,’ a
student informed Karen that he still lived with ‘his janitors.’ ‘No,’ she had
responded, too quickly, ‘A janitor is someone who cleans up after you.’
‘Needless, to say,’ Karen joked later, ‘As a 30-something male in Italy,
the difference was altogether lost on him.’
Stereotype or not, I still smile at the thought of it. And though this
all happened more than a decade ago, and Josh has since moved to Germany and
Karen now flaunts her hats in Prague, the false friends theme is as relevant
for me today as it was then. Alas, I recently had to come to terms with a
standard but frightening piece of Italian paperwork called Dichiarazione ai fini delle detrazioni d’imposta codici fiscali
familiari (Art 23 D.P.R. n.600/73 e successive modificazioni). Trust me: if
I knew the real meaning of this title, I’d translate it. For our purposes, it’s
some sort of tax form, and the only safe blank spot on the page is the one for
your name. The document’s purpose? To find out which family members one has ‘a carico.’ To say ‘dependent,’
Italians use a term that literally translates as ‘loaded on you.’ The
implications of ‘How many reliant family members are you carrying on your
back?’ go far beyond my word-count capacity, but the question is so fun, even
as a stand-alone, that perhaps there is no need to press the issue further.
The true bureaucratic trick came later, with the word dipendente, a false friend that means
‘contracted employee with varying levels of benefits.’ Does piecemeal
labor for six companies simultaneously earn you dipendente status? If you’ve
been there, you’ll know: tallying the complexity of Italian contract loopholes
would make for hilarious staff-room entertainment, but it’s a titanic feat to
uncover whether your Co.Co.Pro. contract (which used to be Co.Co.Co. before the
reform and now is something else whose acronym has escaped all mortals)
constitutes what Italians call ‘employment’ as per this form. You might just
have a consulente position, in which case ‘living under a bridge one day’ needs to be part
of the ‘career objective’ section of your résumé.
Filling out this tax form meant having to call multiple firms and saying
something along the lines of ‘Hello, I am an idiot. Do I really work for you?’
Here is a prize-winning sample:
‘Senti, Marco, am I un tuo dipendente?’
‘Un mio dipendente? No, te dipendi
da me solo moralmente. You only depend on me morally.’
Ah, finally. An answer that is easy to understand.
