Agita

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Susan in Encinitas.

Hi, Susan. Encinitas, California, I take it, yes?

Yes.

Lovely Encinitas.

Well, Susan, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

I have a question about the word agita.

Agita?

Agita. I grew up in Connecticut, and it was a word I heard a lot. It was a word that one of my friends actually used a lot.

And then the other day, I received an email from my boss that used the word agita and copied one of my coworkers who’s in the Midwest. And I think the email said something to the effect of this article gave me agita.

And my coworker wrote me the next day and said, what does she mean? You know, what is agita? She said that she and someone else in her office had looked it up and couldn’t find any reference to it. And part of it might have been the spelling. And they had never heard of it.

And I asked a couple people here in California, had they heard the word ajava, and they hadn’t. And I’m wondering, where does it come from, and is it a regional New York, Northeast thing?

Yeah, Susan, a couple of things. Number one, how was it used, and how did they spell it?

She spelt it, I think, O-G-I-D-A, ajava.

-huh.

O-G-I-D-A. And you said that somebody’s boss said this article gave me ajita, meaning that it made them unhappy?

You know, I would take it as, you know, it gave me stomach acid. The way I had used it before was mostly, one of my friends would say, every time she had tomato sauce, it gave her ajita.

-huh, -huh.

So, you know, it’d give you an upset stomach. But I think in this sense, it was more, you know, it made me nervous. It made me upset. So a generalized feeling of just ickiness and upset. Discomfort. A total body migraine. I’ve heard it described that way.

That’s a new one. And your friend, the friend that you learned this from, who used it all the time, is she of Italian heritage perhaps?

She is.

Aha. And she’s from Connecticut?

Yes.

Well, Susan, you do have exactly the meaning of it, which is heartburn or stomach acid.

Is it an Italian thing?

Yes, it is.

I don’t…

Really?

It originally was Italian, yes, as a matter of fact. And you know what’s really interesting? It doesn’t start to occur in printed English really until the 1980s, the early 1980s, although I’m sure it was around decades before that.

And how would you spell it? Because when we did Google it as O-G-I-D-A, I don’t think it came up.

Yeah, well, that’s because ordinarily it’s spelled A-G-I-T-A.

Oh, okay.

Agita. And there are a couple of different theories about where that comes from.

Such as?

Such as, well, there’s the heartburner stomach acid theory, and there’s also the idea that it might come from agitare, which means to be agitated.

Oh, okay. I’m a proponent of the first theory, and here’s why. If you look in dictionaries of Sicilian dialect, and I have a couple of those at home, you’ll find that there’s a phrase, I’m going to mispronounce this, and all the Sicilians are going to call me up and tell me exactly how to do it correctly, but perhaps it’s agitut di stomaco, or asitut istamaku, which literally means acid or vinegar of the stomach. And that first word is spelled A-C-I-T-U.

And I could easily see how the spelling might change from region to region or when Italians or Sicilians specifically came to the United States, they might phonetically spell it out because it’s easy to see how that C might be rendered as a G in certain speech. But this is all neither here nor there. In any case, I think it’s related specifically to Sicilian dialect of Italian.

So is it an Italian thing or is it a New York thing? Like I said, you know, if it’s an Italian thing, you would think we covered three regions with it. Here’s the thing. No, it’s not an Italian thing specifically. You will not find the word A-G-I-T-A listed with anything like this meaning in any Italian dictionary that I know of. And I’ve looked this up before and done a little bit of backgrounding on this, and it’s not in there.

But when Italians came to the New World, they came by the gazillions. And a lot of times they all kind of created local, that is to say parts of New York had one specific kind of Italian that they spoke, where they took the dialect from this region and the dialect from that region. And some of the best features of all these different dialects kind of prevailed. So they developed during decades their own regional kind of New York dialect of Italian.

So it’s very easy to see. I mean, there are lexicons of this stuff. It’s very easy to see how this word could occur among Italian speakers in New York. They could still be speaking Italian as far as it goes.

Yeah, and non-Italian speakers as well.

That’s right. When you say Italian, though, in the new world, you’re really talking about some of these dialects are so different from each other, they’re almost incomprehensible. I mean, in the written form, they’re far more comprehensible, but they sound very different. They have a different rhythm, different vocabulary, the whole thing.

So, Susan, I have a suggestion for you.

Okay.

If your friends are challenging you about the word agita, I think you should all get together and rent the Woody Allen film Broadway Danny Rose.

There we go. There’s a whole song in there about agita.

Oh, really? And as far as most etymologists are concerned, that is the moment in which this word entered the national consciousness. It became something other than a New Yorkism or, say, a New York, Connecticut, New Jerseyism, and actually reached a larger mainstream English.

Okay. So, Susan, are you feeling any now?

I am not.

We helped you get rid of your agita?

You did get rid of my agita, so thank you.

All right.

You’re very welcome.

All right.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Antacid Radio right here. Well, if a linguistic question is giving you agita, give us a call. The number is 1-877-929-9673 or email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.