Italian language lab: "Negazionista"

I am still learning Italian, after all of these years, because modern life continues to unfold and words are coined or emerge more prominently. 

And hence I am still marveling over tiny flourishes that make Italian distinctive and which seem -- maybe only to me -- to render the particular character of the Italian people manifest. In this case, "negazionista," the word Italians have been using to describe the people who deny or play down the pandemic (it's also used for those who deny other verifiable facts). If you click on this hyperlink, you'll find a piece about an Italian man who'd been propagating falsehoods about Covid-19 until he fell ill with it; the headline, which for me is golden, and which you can see here in the picture, begins: Il Negazionista Pentito ("the remorseful denier," is one way to translate it; the whole headline reads, "The remorseful denier: I'm sick, I have Covid. Now I understand").

I may get a little carried away because I've known myself to practically weep over the word 'babbo' (which means Daddy). The rational side of me says the word 'negazionista' is a logical linguistic locution. Negare, after all, can be translated as the English verb 'to deny,' and 'ista' is a common suffix to denote an individual engaged habitually in a particular action -- often a profession (A journalist, for example, is a giornalista; a corporate shareholder is an azionista; you'll recognize it maybe from the term 'fashionista,' which is used in America, and of course English retains this usage -- journalist, dentist, pharmacist, etc).

So perhaps 'negazionista' isn't all that tricky a word combination.

But it sounds oh so tricky to me. (And what's wonderful is that it's a true Italian coinage. None of this 'Il Jobs Act' or 'Lo spread' or 'Il personal branding' where Italians act as though their native tongue is too impoverished to create new words and/or concepts invented abroad are so superior they need to retain their original English-language nomenclature).

It reminds me a bit of some of the swooning I do over Natalia Ginzburg's books. 

Maybe because it's the simplest little Italian linguistic tics that seem cozy. When I gave my graduate lecture at Bennington (for my MFA), I waxed poetically about the way Italians will sometimes add "la" to women's names when referring to them in the third person. In Ginzburg's masterpiece, Lessico Famigliare ("Family Lexicon"), she refers to her sister as 'la Paola.'  I am, for example, 'la Jeanne,' and yes, I've heard Italian friends refer to me that way.

It's a tiny thing, and something that actually cannot easily be translated and so it's not. In Jenny McPhee's masterful translation of Ginzburg's book (which I reviewed for the Kenyon Review), she dispenses with the "la" and just says "Paola."

But getting back to negazionista: we, too, in America have people who aren't taking the pandemic seriously or don't even think there IS a pandemic. And they're referred to as "pandemic deniers." But, see, there's nothing tricky about a denier. 

To be the equivalent of a negazionista, we'd need to call the deniers, I don't know, something like deny-men or deny-ists.   

And so I'm pretty happy to conclude this trip to the Italian language lab with the thought that Italian is an incredibly rich language that I have the privilege of knowing and exploring.

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