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'That's Amore! The Language of Love for Lovers of Language' |
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Written by Tish Wells, MCT
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Tuesday, 13 February 2007 |
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"That's Amore! The Language of Love for Lovers of Language"
by Erin McKean
Walker & Co.
Price: $14.95
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When in Rome, do as the Romans do and call your love a little potato. That's "patatino" in Italian, one of many lovely digressions on love found in "That's Amore," a slim just-in-time-for-Valentine's-Day book by the distinguished wordsmith Erin McKean.
Without her you might never know that what the English call "puppy love," Indonesians call "monkey love." ("Cinta monyet," in Indonesian) Or that the Dutch sometimes call their darlings "poepies," which are just what they sound like, scatologically speaking.
McKean, editor of "Verbatim: the Language Quarterly," should know. She's an academic having fun in "That's Amore," serving up dozens of linguistic petit fours on the themes of love. This is entertaining. It's nice to know, for example, that while ardent English-speakers do it like bunnies, ardent Italians do it like hedgehogs.
McKean also has a way with language on her own. From her brief essay titled "Love at First Sight," take this: "Lovers can never hide their new besotted state. The rising blush; the new stammer in the speech of the formerly silver-tongued; the sudden lack of hand-eye coordination (and consequent dropped pencils, keys and change); the inability to remember common nouns (including one's own name); all these are unmistakable signs and symptoms of love."
Sometimes, she's so sharp she's pungent, as when she quotes the Latin observation "'mor tussique non celantur' — Love and a cough cannot be concealed."
And sometimes McKean's sloppy: the book's paltry index fails to list the essays or organize phrases by country.
Still, without her, how would we ever know that "In Tenegapa (Mexico), the courtship begins when a boy throws orange peels at the object of his affections; she responds by throwing rocks at him."
The behavioral pattern, McKean adds, is "familiar to anyone in Western culture who ever attended school."
Historical anecdotes abound. The Roman statesman Cato (the Elder) would only kiss his wife after a thunderclap. Opals were considered unlucky but "Queen Victoria gave all her daughters opals at their marriage (much to the delight of her opal-mining Australian subjects)."
Then there was Napoleon Bonaparte who, thoroughly love-sick, wrote to his wife, Josephine: "A thousand kisses on your eyes, your lips, your tongue, your heart. Most charming of thy sex, what is thy power over me? I am very sick of thy sickness; I have still a burning fever!"
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