Here’s something fun and mildly pointless. Spaghetti's having quite a field day on Twitter—first, when a moviegoer admitted that she brings bagfuls of spaghetti with her to movie theaters, a move so brash and subversive that it's become the stuff of Refinery29 articles.
And last Thursday, one Boston resident, tweeting under the handle @caroramsey, discovered the singular word for spaghetti: “spaghetto.” It sent Twitter into overdrive—look at those metrics, likes and favorites in the tens of thousands, climbing as I type!
(Language, caro!)
This isn't a doctored image. It's indeed right there in Wiktionary, explaining this word's Italian origins. It upends common usage of the word spaghetto. “Spaghetti made with ramen noodles and ketchup,” according to Urban Dictionary. Wrong, Urban Dictionary, as you often are. Spaghetto is a solitary, stringy strand of spaghetti, just as a panino is a lone panini.
Meaningless fact? Sure, I guess, you miser. Chide us for devoting a whole blog post to this quirk of language, unbeknownst to a good chunk of Twitter—and, perhaps, to you. There’s a red, squiggly line forming beneath the word "spaghetto" each time I type it, a prompt from my computer to make sure I don’t mean "spaghetti." Nope! I mean spaghetto.
At the very least, maybe you’ve learned something new today. So go ahead: Amend your recipe instructions. Lessen your character counts. “A single strand of spaghetti” eats up way more real estate than the word “spaghetto.” Gently ease it into your lexicon: spaghetto. It’s a good word.
Any other food words you didn't know? Let us know in the comments.
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Written by: Mayukh Sen
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20 Comments
One piece of fermented cabbage please... a kimcho
One leg of that 8tentacled sea creature is an octopo
Just one of those flavor tasting receptacles on my tongue -- its umamo
And a little pancake for my caviar? A blino
Relaxing outside in my Jacuzz-o munching on just one shrimp scampo
Is one little potato dumpling a gnoccho?
Cooking japanese style on my hibacho
My one friend from Kabul is an Afghano
Dont want a lot of that Indian rice, just a biryano
just one little Italian pastry please... a cannolo
Mi hai fatto prendere uno spaghetto! You scared me!
And remember that spaghetti should be pronounced with hard g (like in golf or gorilla, not jet or jolly).
In Italian, nouns are masculine or feminine.
If the singular form of a noun ends in 'o', then it is masculine and the pluralized form ends in 'i'.
If the singular form ends in 'a', then the noun is feminine and the pluralized form ends in 'e'.
Some singular nouns end in 'e'. These are typically pluralized with the letter 'i' but there is no way to tell if noun is masculine or feminine. For example, 'ponte' is singular for 'bridge' and the plural is 'ponti'. 'Parte' is singular for 'part' and the plural is 'parti'. However, 'ponte' is masculine and 'parte' is feminine. One simply needs to memorize these or recall a usage with a mnemonic, like an adjective which also varies based on gender and singular/plural.
Let's say you're a beginner Italian student and you're trying to figure out if 'ponte' is masculine or feminine. You can look it up in a dictionary or maybe you remember the name 'Ponte Vecchio' ('Old Bridge') which is clearly masculine based on the 'o' at the end of 'vecchio'.
There are a handful of exceptions, but by in large, Italian follows very consistent rules, far more reliably than some related languages like French.
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