20 Italian-American Words That Would Get You Lost in Italy

Somewhere in your family, somebody called the bathroom the baccausa. It sounds like it came over on the boat from Sicily. It's actually two English words, back house, said with a Sicilian accent, and it's not the only one your grandparents built in America. This is the follow-up to 20 Words Your Italian Grandparents Used That Don't Exist in Italy, and it starts with the words you asked for in the comments. The first half is old southern Italian words that changed shape or meaning over here, like gavadeel, googootz, chooch and goomah. The second half is the words immigrants made out of English, from giobba and storo to fattoria and sanemagogna, the word a 1918 study of immigrant speech took for its title. Number one goes back to the backyard privies of a Lower East Side tenement. If you grew up in an Italian American family, subscribe for more: https://www.youtube.com/@MulberryStreetMemo?sub_confirmation=1 Words covered: stat-ta-zeet, gavadeel, googootz, schiaff, scungilli, soupy, chooch, gavone, goomah, giobba, storo, carro, trobolo, orrioppo, pezza, iarda, fattoria, sanemagogna, Broccolino, and baccausa.