Online since June 1997!

Chicken on the Menu

23-Mar-02 -- My mother is an amazing woman.  She knows four languages very well and was pursuing her doctorate in languages (especially French) in Italy when she met my father.  She quickly acclimated to English, but my father also learned her native tongue, unlike the majority of American men I've found who marry women from other countries.  Thusly, Italian was my first language and I've always found foreign language interesting and seemingly easier than other people.  I am sure I get that from both of my parents.  My mother does have a strong Italian accent in English, but she speaks English very well.  She does not speak it "good" like many Americans say ungrammatically. 

My siblings and I have no accent, even though my little brother was born when we lived in Italy and we had lived abroad a part of our childhoods.  Being the first born when my mother was not yet fully speaking English I was the only one who started life with a non-English language, not that I'm complaining.  My siblings and I were not ever embarrassed by my mother's accent ever because she was obviously very intelligent.  We did, however, have to get used to some of the peculiarities of her pronunciation.  One of my favorites is the word "probably" which my mother to this day pronounces with an accent on the second syllable (pro-BAB-lee).  She also says "hamburgess" instead of hamburger.  She also never really mastered the "W" which does not exist in Italian except to pronounce foreign words.  My father's name being "William" she said "Guilliam" and said "goo-man" to say "woman".  She also says "girl" as "g-ee-rl".  I never really learned the English word for "dustpan" until my adulthood.  It was always the palatina.

It's all cute, but one day only a few years ago (I was already in my 30's) I was in a restaurant and I saw someone had some breaded chicken that my mother used to always make.  So I asked where the plate was on the menu.  He said, "You mean the chicken cutlet?"  No, I said, my mother always used to ask us if we wanted COTOLETTE.  Surely the waiter was mistaken.  Well sure enough I had thought my mother's COTOLETTE was a dish unavailable until then in the restaurants and put two and two together to realize that all these years she was trying to say "CUTLET" which in Italian is "cotoletto"!  You can imagine how embarrassed I was at my lack of realization.