A Bimbo by Any Other Name

By Patricia Winton

Today on Novel Adventurers, I write about children’s games in Italy, including one called Bimbo. In English that word carries a pejorative connotation—a sexy, female airhead—but in Italian, it’s a word wrapped with parental love.

Bimbo is the diminutive of bambino, a male child—from birth to around puberty. The feminine version is bambina, or bimba. It’s not unusual to hear a father call out, “Bimbe (plural), venite qua,” (girls, come here). The use of bimbo or its feminine or plural forms suggests affection, in the same way that my grandfather called me Patty while others said Patricia.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records the first usage of bimbo in English in 1919; at that time it meant a man who wasn't very smart. And in the 1930s, cartoon character Betty Boop—who in today’s English could be called a bimbo—had a boyfriend named Bimbo, sorely lacking in intelligence.

The word bimbo, meaning woman, first appears in the 1929 version of the OED, citing an article in a scholarly journal; it didn’t have a negative meaning then. But two 1929 films moved the word bimbo towards it current English meaning. In the first, a silent film called Desert Nights, a sexy, wealthy female thief was called a bimbo. But the more celebrated, The Broadway Melody (the first “talkie” to win an Oscar), probably holds the honor as the chief vehicle for transporting the meaning to a sexy, dumb woman. In the film, an angry character calls a chorus girl a bimbo.

There’s a shop near my home called Bimbo Point. It makes me smile every day as I pass because the juxtaposition of the two languages could lead to confusion. Italians understand that the shop sells children’s clothing, but what do English speakers who don’t know Italian think? Another shop nearby, Io Bimbo (Me, Baby), also deals in children’s items.

 
A recent item in the Los Angeles Times seemed to be mixing languages. The headline read, “Ready for post-bimbo era in Italy.” Now, Italy has the lowest birthrate in Europe, but to begin an era with no babies is unthinkable! The article actually addressed moving beyond former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s days in power. It examined his sexual exploits and the way he uses scantily-clad young women on his television stations.

Berlusconi created the first privately owned television station in Italy. One of its earliest shows, still running, parodies the news of the day with young women wearing few clothes prancing on stage to hand sheets of paper with news items to the hosts. These bits of paper are called veline, named for the onionskin paper that Benito Mussolini's censors sent to editors throughout Italy with their acceptable slant on the news.

The young women themselves came to be called veline, and they now appear on a wide variety of television programs, even in the pre-dinner hour. They also grace television commercials for anything from exercise equipment to yoghurt. In many ways the veline in Italian are the bimbos in English.

The drawing of the velina comes from Dianne Hales at  Becoming Italian Word by Word

Lost in Translation

My British friends and I talk about the common language that divides us. We consult each other for translations when we read. For example, when I read Joanna Harris’s Gentlemen and Players, I called up my friend Glenys. “What’s a conker?” I asked. Later when she was reading To Kill a Mockingbird, she had to know, “What are druthers?”

My first encounter with the disparity came many years ago during an early trip to England. I was staying with some people in Sussex and we were having a domestic discussion of some kind. The woman spoke about a paraffin heater. I was quite alarmed. “Isn’t that dangerous?” I said. She replied that it was normal. I persisted in voicing my concern until someone else explained to both of us that paraffin in the U.S. is wax while paraffin in Britain is kerosene.

I’ve been enjoying this diversity ever since. In teaching English as a second language, I often have to do three-way translations. Again, I first encountered this anomaly some years ago while teaching a class in Washington, D.C. At that school, American English ruled. A European student was shocked at a sentence in the lesson. “Isn’t it a ten dollar note?”  “No, dear. It’s a ten pound note, but it’s a ten dollar bill.”

Now, all my students are European, but many want to visit the U.S. The textbooks I use are British, so when the word queue comes up and someone asks what it means, I translate into Italian, but explain that it means line in America. I try to limit myself to practical words that may cause trouble for the tourist, like elevator vs. lift and such like. Even this gets confusing. Italians use the word lifting to mean face lift, or general firming up of the body. It can be a bit complicated to get into how that all fits together.

To me the most shocking discovery has been that publishers translate from English to English on either side of the Atlantic. I first learned this while doing a lesson with a thirteen-year-old Italian girl. She loved Harry Potter. We each had a copy of HP and the Philosopher’s Stone, my copy published in the U.S., hers in Britain. In the scene where we first meet Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall, he offers her something. My young student read lemon sherbet and I stopped her. “That’s lemon drop.” We compared texts. Lemon sherbet in the U.S. is not a hard lemon sweet, er, candy.

 And while I can understand the need to do this kind of translations for books marketed to children, I don’t think it’s necessary for adults. I’m not especially happy to see Faulkner’s practice changed to practise, but I can accept it since editors usually seek consistency. But it’s egregious when translation weakens the prose. 

I reread Capote’s In Cold Blood a couple of years ago. When I got to page 87 of the British-printed edition I was reading, I stopped cold. In the passage describing how neighbors and the hired man cleaned up after the murders, I read:

They unloaded the truck and made a pyramid of Nancy’s pillows, the bedclothes, the mattresses, the playroom couch; Stoeklein sprinkled it with paraffin and struck a match.

I didn’t need to check the text to know that that last phrase should have read kerosene. The poetry of Capote’s prose with that interplay of s’s and k’s had been destroyed by a sloppy editor who, exactly 100 pages later, left in the phrase “scalding water and kerosene lamps.”

 Would a British reader have been confused? Maybe. Maybe not. But a careful reader who takes joy in words would have delighted in the poetry and looked up the meaning.