Word: italianity
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Negro maid to an Italian mistress sat in the witness chair of a Brooklyn, N. Y. divorce trial last week "making horns." Carrie Cooper raised her hands to her forehead, sticking up two fingers, and made a laboriously ugly face. That, she said, was what her 36-year-old mistress, Mrs. Josephine Marotta, had done behind the back of her old husband, Giacomo, who is just twice...
...Brooklyn judge did not understand why this slight gesture was considered important testimony in a divorce case. Court Interpreter Vincent D'Agrossa volunteered to explain. This case involved an Italian couple, and to Italians the bit of old-world folklore had plenty of meaning. The gesture, said Interpreter D'Agrossa, was "what we call cornuto." It was an ancient custom to cut the spurs off castrated cocks and graft them to the birds' heads, where they grew as horns. Since the horned capon was a strutting definition of sexual inadequacy, its horns became a symbol of cuckoldry...
Benito Mussolini strode pompously into the Italian Chamber and sat down with folded arms last week. Il Duce did not, however, assume his celebrated frown, for this was going to be fun, and he was being carefully watched through a monocle by the French Ambassador, extremely potent M. Andre Frangois-Poncet, today the No. 1 Continental diplomat...
...elegant, bemonocled French Ambassador feigned not to understand what was meant in the Chamber when all the Deputies without exception jumped to their feet and, encouraged by two eminent Fascist scream-leaders, screamed in frenzied Italian unison : "Tunisia! Tunisia...
...scream-leaders were His Excellency Grand Councilor Achille Starace ("The Panther Man"), Secretary General of the Fascist Party since 1932, and His Excellency Roberto Farinacci ("Italian Jew Baiter No. 1"), who that very day had been promoted to Councilor of State.* The screams of all Italian Deputies meant of course that Italy was asking France to give her Tunisia as the Reich was given the Sudetenland, without a fight...