From last week’s Time Literary Supplement, which I finally take at home now that I’m so spottily able to get my work copy. The article ‘Il trend’ for finglese is an interesting optimism piece on Italian stopping its constant borrowing of English words into the comical ‘il road map’ structure. Now I love Italian and hope it will stop this nonsense but I love a witty jab even more so here’s a description of Italian the piece cites:
In The Sabre Squadron (1966), the third volume of his Alms for Oblivion sequence, Simon Raven was mean about Italian: “A degenerate tongue … its constant juxtaposition of the diminutive with the grandiose transposes everything … to the same level of trivial hysteria. No wonder the Italians are at once so conceited and so futile; their language compels them to live a libretto.”
Extracts 