Red faces for Italian purists as ‘cringe’ officially added to lexicon by Florence language academy

What would Italian poet Dante Alighieri have thought of the new addition?

Credit: FILIPPO VENEZIA/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock 

It’s enough to make a linguistic purist wince — the English word cringe has officially entered the Italian lexicon.

The word has been recognised by the Accademia della Crusca, the country’s foremost language institute and stalwart guardians of Italian, along with a plethora of terms linked to the pandemic. 

The academy added cringe to a list of English words that have recently been adopted by Italians after noticing it cropping up a lot on social media, chiefly among younger people.

The word is used by Italians just as it is in English: to denote something awkward or mildly shameful.

The word is a “synonym for embarrassing, used to describe situations or behaviour that provoke embarrassment or unease in the person observing them,” said linguist Luisa Di Valvasone.

The act of cringing means to “draw in or contract one’s muscles involuntarily, as from cold or pain … or to recoil in distaste.”

Italians have even invented their own variants of the word, from “cringissimo” meaning very cringe-worthy, to “cringiare”, a novel verb form.

The academy tends to be sniffy about English words and phrases being adopted by Italians, especially when there are perfectly decent Italian equivalents available. 

It said it was not endorsing the linguistic imports, merely documenting them.

The creep of Anglicisms into the language of Dante and Petrarch has grown during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Among the other words that have recently been adopted are: contact tracing, coronavirus, droplet and lockdown.

Other recent imports from the Anglo-Saxon linguistic world include boomer, foodie and ghosting.

Some of the Anglicisms now in common use in Italian are of older pedigree: hater and influencer were added to the list in 2019 and selfie in 2014. 

Italians have made verbs out of popular social media channels — twittare means to Tweet, while whatsappare means to send a message on Whatsapp.

The linguistic exchange goes both ways, though. English is full of Italian words, from pizza and pasta to fiasco, opera, stiletto, diva and gelato. 

But the two-way exchange has been unbalanced in recent decades, with English words flooding into Italian. Italian advertising, newspapers and magazines are peppered with English phrases, often used incorrectly, sometimes to comic effect. 

Baby gang is a bunch of teenage delinquents, while sexy shop is a shop that sells sex toys and pornographic material.

For some Italians, the relentless incursion of English is particularly regretful given that the country is this year commemorating the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante, the poet considered to be the father of modern Italian.

Known in Italy as Il Sommo Poeta or the Supreme Poet, he wrote in a Tuscan dialect which was eventually adopted as standard Italian.

Born in Florence in 1265, he died in Ravenna in September 1321. His Divine Comedy is widely regarded as the greatest literary work in Italian.