WRTG-101-003

“Chao como estas?” “Ciao come stai?” Even to a person who doesn’t speak neither Italian or Spanish these two sentences sound very similar. It is known to basically everyone that Spanish and Italian sound very alike, but I would argue that is basically the same language. In Italy, you are required to choose a language (apart form English, of course) to take in middle school. The most popular choices are either French or Spanish. I, of course following my life philosophy of “work smarter, not harder”, chose Spanish. I though it would be an easy ride given that I knew already that the languages were very similar so I wouldn’t have to work as much as learning French. Given that, I was not stressing that much about the class, but as the first lesson came around, I was surprised how the teacher could talk in Spanish and me and all my classmates could understand her perfectly. Someone could have a full conversation in Spanish in front of me and, yes, maybe I wouldn’t ...

Coming from Italy, we use a lot  of swear words, at least young people do, but since I came to the United States I noticed one huge difference: many people here use swear words in very friendly ways. The most noticeable one I found was the word "bitch". I remember my American friends saying "How are you, bitch?" or "You're such a bad bitch" and it took me a while to figure out that they were actually being nice to me and not insulting me. In Italy, calling someone bitch is taken seriously, as it is a very offensive term, but here, it seems to signify strong female friendship, why? I went to my bible for American slang: The Urban Dictionary . The definition they give is very interesting: one of the most versatile words in the english language; it is used to express a multitude of emotions; anger, anticipation,  despair ,  endearment , envy, excitement, fear, horror, joy, shock, surprise, warning; all achieved by one's enunciation and  intonati...