Abstract
Darla (‘give it-fem.’) ‘of women, to have sexual relations with someone, especially in a loose manner’ (De Mauro 1999–2000: II, 469) and darlo (‘give it-masc.’), which is attributed two meanings, ‘to lend oneself to sodomy’ (De Mauro 1999–2000: II, 470) and ‘of men, to sexually possess a woman’ (Boggione and Casalegno 2000: 152; 2004: 166), have enjoyed varying fortunes in the Italian language. While darla is well-established in the average speaker’s lexicon, darlo (in both meanings) remains highly marginal. These two verbs attest to a lexical asymmetry resulting from the misogynistic view ingrained in Western culture of women as inferior, inherently immoral, and wanton, and their different fates show that sociocultural attitudes and stereotypes shape language change.
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Notes
- 1.
Darlo without subscript is used to refer to darlo1 and darlo2 jointly.
- 2.
CORIS/CODIS (http://dslo.unibo.it/), is a corpus of modern written Italian developed at the CILTA (Centre for Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Bologna). Presently, it contains 130 million words and consists of a collection of authentic and commonly occurring texts in electronic format, which are considered to be highly representative of modern Italian, and includes an assortment of diverse genres (press, fiction, academic and legal and administrative prose, miscellanea).
- 3.
I asked about thirty family members and friends, all native speakers of Italian, to provide a definition of darla and darlo and their opinion on appropriate contexts for the use of the verbs.
- 4.
‘[V]erbs characterized by a meaning of their own, which cannot be inferred from the source verb or have become highly fossilized’.
- 5.
Note that neither darla nor darlo appear in the dictionaries of Accademia della Crusca (online versions, http://www.accademiadellacrusca.it) nor in Vocabolario Treccani (1997) and Grande dizionario della lingua italiana moderna (1998) is the only single-volume general dictionary that includes darla with the same definition as in Battaglia (1961–).
- 6.
Lexemes labeled ‘common’ are “vocaboli che sono usati e compresi indipendentemente dalla professione e mestiere che esercitiamo o dalla collocazione regionale e che sono generalmente noti a chiunque abbia un livello mediosuperiore di istruzione” ‘words that are used and understood independently of our profession, trade or geographical domain, and that are generally known by anyone with a mid-high level of education’ (De Mauro 1999–2000: xx).
- 7.
Boggione and Casalegno include the expression dare di dietro ‘to get fucked [lit. to give] from behind’ under the entry for dare with the definition of “sodomizzare” to ‘sodomize’ (2000: 152; 2004: 167), while the expression dare il culo ‘to get fucked in the ass’ is included in the index of voices by semantic field under Omosessualità e sodomia ‘Homosexuality and sodomy’ (2000: 681; 2004: 742).
- 8.
Galli de’ Paratesi (1969: 42) reports the expressions quello che lo dà (lit. ‘the one who gives it’) and quello che lo prende (lit. ‘the one who takes it), glossed respectively as ‘active pederast’ and ‘passive pederast’, and states that lo “sta per ano” ‘lo stands for ‘anus’’; in a footnote, however, she states that the two expressions are ambiguous since the pronoun “secondo alcuni sta per ano, secondo altri per pene” ‘according to some [lo] stands for ‘anus’, according to others for ‘penis’’(original italics) (fn. 5, p. 42).
- 9.
The edition of Aretino’s work I use as a reference is Sei giornate. Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia (1534). Dialogo nel quale la Nanna insegna a la Pippa (1536), edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia. Bari: Laterza, 1969.
- 10.
Essere come la pila dell’acquasanta ‘to be like the holy water font’ is a well-known Italian saying meaning ‘something that is touched by everyone’ and, more specifically ‘a woman of loose morals’.
- 11.
Regarding his sources, De Mauro states that when the date of the first attestation of an entry is not followed by examples or comments, it comes from previous works, primarily Battaglia (1961–) and Nicolò Tommaseo Dizionario della lingua italiana (1861–1879); given that Tommaseo’s dictionary does not list darla, the date 1536 must come from Battaglia.
- 12.
In Lotti (1992: 125) Aretino in parentheses precedes the definition of darla, and the following examples:
- 13.
Cf. Battaglia’s (1961–: IV, 32) definition of darsi: “acconsentire alle profferte d’amore, alle richieste di matrimonio, abbandonarsi all’essere amato con assoluta dedizione. In particolare ‘concedersi’ (una donna)” ‘to consent to amorous advances, to marriage requests, surrender to the loved one with absolute devotion. In particular, ‘to give oneself [sexually]’ (of women)’.
- 14.
The Opera del vocabolario italiano (OVI) database “contains 1960 vernacular texts (22.3 million words, 456,000 unique forms) the majority of which are dated prior to 1375, the year of Boccaccio's death. The verse and prose works include early masters of Italian literature like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as lesser-known and obscure texts by poets, merchants, and medieval chroniclers” (http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/ovi).
- 15.
Boggione and Casalegno (2000: 683) list darsi in their Indice delle voci per ambito semantico ‘Index of voices by semantic field’ under Prostituzione, disponibilità sessuale ‘Prostitution, sexual availability’ and provide several examples from renowned modern Italian writers, such as Gabriele D’annunzio, Alberto Bevilacqua, Pier Paolo Pasolini.
- 16.
It may be worth noting that darlo1 is unattested even in classic texts where sex in general or more specifically homosexuality and sodomy are at center stage and talked about in quite explicit terms, such as Aretino’s Sonetti sopra i XVI modi’ (1526), Antonio Vignali’s La Cazzaria (1525–1527), Francesco Berni’s Rime (early sixteenth century), or Antonio Rocco’s L’Alcibiabe fanciullo a scola (1630), to name a few.
- 17.
The ‘young age’ of darlo2 is also evidenced by the fact that it is not included in Boggione and Casalegno (1996) which is an earlier version of their two later dictionaries.
- 18.
Many thanks to Giuseppe Lagani for pointing out this to me.
- 19.
- 20.
Worthy of note is also the Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/-Dalla-non-%C3%A8-un-cantantema-un-consiglio-120653937990249/, featuring the photo of the worldwide famed porn star Rocco Siffredi.
- 21.
Note that neither darlo1 nor darlo2 are found in CORIS/CODIS.
- 22.
I found the following occurrence of darlo in Aldo Busi’s Sodomie in corpo 11 (1988: 255): arrivederci, Busi, e buon soggiorno in Kenya e mi raccomando: sia casto, e soprattutto eviti di andare con le bianche! Non lo dia in bocca al lupo! ‘goodbye Busi, and have a nice stay in Kenya and remember: be chaste and above all avoid going with white women! Don’t give it in the wolf’s jaws!’. The sentence eviti di andare con le bianche ‘avoid going with white women’ signals a heterosexual context, indicating that this is an instance of darlo2.
- 23.
Note that Vocabolario Treccani defines concedersi as “darsi, consentire a un rapporto sessuale” ‘to give oneself, to consent to sex’, and illustrates with the sentence “si è concessa al suo amante” ‘she gave herself to her lover’ (http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/concedere/; my emphasis, cr).
- 24.
The wide and varied distribution of darla would indicate that the label gergale ‘slang’ is accurate only in the extended sense of ‘allusive, indirect’, not in the main meaning of ‘characteristic of a specific social group’.
- 25.
Beppe Severgnini is an acclaimed journalist, essayist and columnist who has written extensively on social and cultural aspects of contemporary Italy.
- 26.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Mikołaj Nkollo who, albeit indirectly, suggested to me the topic of this study. Parts of this chapter were presented at the Gender and Language roundtable, the annual meeting of the American Association for Italian Studies, Baton Rouge, April 21, 2016 and the text of the presentation appears in http://www.gendersexualityitaly.com. I thank the organizers for giving me the opportunity to share my ideas and for their helpful feedback. I am also deeply grateful to Adria Frizzi, Chiara McCarty and Case McCarty, and Laura Seccia for assisting me in the English translation of contemporary Italian texts and/or providing insightful comments, and to David Birdsong and Chiyo Nishida for reading the final draft. Any errors or misunderstandings remain of course my own.
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Russi, C. (2019). On the Varying Fortunes of darla and darlo in Italian. In: Arteaga, D. (eds) Contributions of Romance Languages to Current Linguistic Theory. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 95. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11006-2_11
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