This, ahem, does happen in the blog world. And to me. But this one more interesting than most.
Did you know I can see what search lead to a click on my site? I can! It's fun! The strangest things end up leading to me page. Like "teaching today sucks," "I hate teaching," "why do i teach?" and "life sucks."
Side note - need some more positivity in my life/writing.
Anyway, this afternoon someone looked up "what does Che Brutta mean in English?" I shall tell you the whole sordid story.
When I was born many, many, many moons ago on a very cold Friday morning in a northern state, I weighed 6lbs, 13 oz; was TWENTY ONE inches long; and was slightly jaundice. I was declared long and skinny and not very cuddle-able, then popped into a microwave so my liver could finish cooking. I also didn't open my eyes until I was almost a month old. The world is a scary place, yo. Especially when you are put in a microwave almost immediately.
So the legend goes, my grandma came to meet me. This would be my tiny, old, adorable, squishy, butt-slapping, face-pinching, mother-fucking-delicious-lasagna-making Italian grandma (I didn't meet my mom's family until I was 10. Long story.)
She took one look at her under-cooked, scrawny, skinny, shut-eyed first grandchild and said, "Che brutta! Ma dolce."
This became my nickname in my family. If I was being a brat, I was "chebrutta." If I was throwing a tantrum, I was "chebrutta - il duce!" If my grandma was anywhere around, I was "chebrutta, ma dolce."
I was called this constantly, but no one would tell me what it meant. Grandma just said, "it's not nice." And since I had no idea how to spell in Italian (very different letter scheme than English or Spanish) I couldn't just look it up in the dictionary.
Now, in Florida, in college, you are required to take a foreign language. But if you took Spanish in high school, you have to take the SAT2 to test into college Spanish. And I am a cheap mofo, and I didn't want to spend the money to prove that three years of high school Spanish left me a) unable to say anything except "Donde esta el bano?" "Purco: el otro carne blanco," and "El queso chistoso es en mi cabeza," and b) a significant fear of Honduran women and poems about horse's testicles.
So I chose to take Italian so I could read my grandma's recipes and figure out what in the hell she's been calling me all these years.
So first I learned all 21 letters in Italian, and that "che" is a hard sound (kay) and "ce" is soft sound (think cheese).
Then I got out my dictionary and found this:
"che" - how
"brutta" - ugly
My family has been calling me ugly since the day I was born.
I was very upset with Grandma, and totally would have called her and bitched her out, but she was like 91 and not very "there" at the time. My dad thought it was funny; my mom was horrified and decided my grandma was evil; and my brother was thankful he got stuck with "Antonio Guiseppe Guido."
It was about 21 years too late to change my nickname, however.
In case you still care, "ma dolce" means "but sweet" and "il duce" was the name for Mussolini - basically, "THE Dictator."
And people wonder why I try to avoid my family.
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