Word: guido
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Tricarico has been researching Guidos for over 20 years and has put out academic papers with titles such as "Youth Culture, Ethnic Choice, and the Identity Politics of Guido," "Guido: Fashioning An Italian-American Youth Style," and "Dressing Up Italian Americans For The Youth Spectacle: What Difference Does Guido Perform...
...advertiser - Dominos - pulled out, sending MTV's programming president Tony DiSanto on the defensive. He told The Hollywood Reporter that "We actually did pull the word 'guidos' from voiceover and descriptions of the show. However, if [the roommates] refer to themselves that way, we let that exist as is." One of the roomies, Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino, doesn't see what the big deal is. A Guido, he says, is just "a good-looking Italian guy." (See a story about how to be Italian...
...comment. It's a pejorative word to depict an uncool Italian who tries to act cool." But is it a generational pejorative? Do younger Americans of Italian descent have a different relationship to the G word? According to Donald Tricarico, a sociology professor at City University of New York/Queensborough, "Guido is a slur, but Italian kids have embraced it just as black kids have embraced the N word. In the same way that radical gays call themselves queer." (See why Do the Right Thing is one of TIME's 25 most important films about race...
...word as a slur against Italian-American men of a certain class and swagger - and there was MTV just letting it rip. As the ramp up to the show continued, Italian-American anti-defamation groups started their drumbeat and the commercial was tweaked ever so slightly: the word "Guido" was replaced with "roommates" - which is more generally the premised cast of the reality show. But that was not the last we heard of Guido, well, because it's all over the show. Indeed, in the first episode of Jersey Shore, the eight housemates wear the Guido and Guidette badge proudly...
There's no date stamp on when the term Guido came into play, but Tricarico theorizes that it very well may have originated as an insult from within the Italian-American community, confering inferior status on immigrants who are "just off the boat." It clearly references non-assimilation in its use of a name more at home in the old homeland. In fact, in different locales, the same slur isn't Guido: in Chicago the term is "Mario" and in Toronto it goes by "Gino." Guido is far less offensive, among Italian-Americans, than another G word, which is also...