Crime in Italy

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Barbara Lukin in Gillette, Wyoming.

Hi, Barbara, how are you doing?

Good, and yourself?

Excellent, thank you.

What’s going on, Barbara?

I was calling to see if you might be able to tell me something about a saying that my great-aunt used to use. She used to say, if us children, well, several of us would maybe be in a problem or not listening well, she’d get upset sometimes, and she’d say, crime in Italy. And I guess I always wondered, you know, what does that mean? Is, you know, we say, well, is it because a crime in Italy is so rare, or is it because it’s something so horrible then, if it is rare, and, you know, that that was something that we were doing that was that extreme and that bad? And I never did ask anyone. So I kept thinking, oh, this would be a good chance to maybe see someone else heard such a saying or something real close, and they might be able to tell me something.

Why not crime in Indonesia or crime in India or crime in Iran or some other country beginning with an eye, right?

Yes, yes, you’re both raising very good questions because it actually comes from Crime in Netly, which has nothing to do with crime in Italy. And that itself derives from criminy, which is sort of a way of not saying Christ. It’s an exclamation. And you don’t hear it so much in the south, but in the north and certainly in the west, you would hear criminy or criminitely.

See, maybe that was it, and we thought for sure it was Italy, not just Italy.

Yeah, well, it sounds that way, doesn’t it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But writers from Faulkner to Ray Bradbury have used crime in Italy. Yeah, you’ll find it often spelled that way and said that way by people who don’t realize that there’s this long series of euphemisms that traces it back to saying Jesus Christ.

Yeah, that is strange then, yeah.

Yeah, I wouldn’t have thought so with my great aunt being, you know, the way she would. Of course, then that’s maybe like saying shut the front door.

Right.

Or something. You’ll get away with it that way and not sound really bad.

Yeah, I hadn’t heard it anywhere else.

Yeah.

Except from her. We all learned it from each other. And because it’s so distanced from the kind of swearing that it originated from, there’s no judgment made about anybody who uses it now. Anybody who goes to church could say it and not be called out from the pulpit.

Thanks, Barbara, for calling us about this, all right?

Yes, thanks a bunch.

Okay, take care.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye.

77-99-9673.