Take It As A Neapolitan Compliment

One woman’s Neapolitan insult is another woman’s compliment.

A woman speaking with a man.

Mariateresa Fichele

Neapolitan is a complex language — not so much for lexical reasons as for the intonation, facial expressions and gestures that necessarily accompany the words and make their real meaning clear.

For example, the other day I witnessed an argument between two people, in which, at one point, he turns to her and says: "Shut up! You’re like a Neapolitanbucchina*."

The woman started to lose it, outraged as she was.

But I was really tempted to step in the conversation to calm the mood by saying: "Signó, don’t be angry. If your husband had called me a ‘Neapolitan bucchina*’ with that face and that little voice of his, not only would I have not gotten angry, but I would have replied: ‘Why thank you, aren’t you a real cutie!’”

____________________________

*”bucchina” is a Neapolitan swear word, which roughly translates as “wh*re” but which can also be used as a compliment, meaning “astute” or “clever.”

Learn more about Worldcrunch's exclusive Dottoré! series here.

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Take It As A Neapolitan Compliment

One woman’s Neapolitan insult is another woman’s compliment.

In the wake of Giulia Cecchettin's death, our Naples-based Dottoré remembers one of her old patients, a victim of domestic abuse.

Ending a pregnancy has become a major complication, and a crime, for Iranian women who cannot or will not have children in a country wracked by socio-economic woes and a leadership.

Tracing the early roots of the concept of the "Russian world" that sees the Russian state as eternal and impervious to change. Its primary objective is the establishment of a robust national state, a realm of expansionism where autocracy is the only form of governance possible.

Iranian media has long blamed Israelis for targeting military and political officials inside Iran. Will Israel's Mossad teams of intelligence operatives resume these eternally murky strikes as retribution for the Oct 7 attack by the Tehran-backed Hamas?

The martyrdom of Mariupol

A bilingual nation

A daughter of Kyiv

The meaning of genocide