Treccani, finally the summer without 'vu cumprà'

The Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia traces the history of the word Vu cumprà, born over the years Eighty to indicate illegal vendors, with a strong racist connotation, which after a period of great diffusion in the media is now part of lexical history, as Rocco Luigi Nichil underlines in 'R&S - Search and rescue. 'Small dictionary of migrant words', the new cycle of interventions published in the magazine Lingua italiana, available on Treccani.it First appeared in an article by Raffaella Candoli in the Resto del Carlino of 1986, which anticipated by a day that of Uber Dondini in the Stampa, in which they were reported the protests of the Romagna traders against of the illegal vendors, mostly African, the expression Vu cumprà, used with a derogatory value bordering on racism, spread rapidly across all media until become a recurring element of television too Italian, after Mazouz M'Barek - "aka Patrick, Moroccan authentic and 'vuo' cumprà" by profession" was called by Antonio Ricci hosted the variety show L'Araba felice in 1988. The Institute of the Encyclopedia retraces its history Italian, which with R&S - Search and Rescue. Small dictionary of migrant words, published in the magazine Lingua italiana in curated by Rocco Luigi Nichil, inaugurates a cycle dedicated to the migratory lexicon, which involves millions of people and which produces not only economic and social repercussions, but also cultural and linguistic. A linguistic invasion, that of the expression Vu cumprà, which dominates the entire 1980s - also generating other occasionalisms of negative value such as vu' emigrà, vu' campà, you take drugs, you study, - until you land in the classrooms parliamentarians, used in perfect equal conditions by representatives of the PCI and the MSI, Treccani notes. The obvious racist connotation, the crystallization negative and stereotyped view of African "immigrants" - despite an entirely unconvincing attempt to attribute its provenance to Raffaele Viviani's 1925 poem 'O tripulino Neapolitan, 'Look, I don't understand / and I tell you: You want cumpra'?' - triggers a reaction led by the former parliamentarian Dacia Valent who wrote in L'Unità in 1989: "Apparently these 'you' cumprà', 'you' sweeps', 'you' drunk', 'you' steals', 'You're dealing', 'You're exploiting' and whoever has more 'You' has more put, they are not candidates to have the rights that all of us have compete, beyond citizenship, places of birth, of skin color, that is, human rights." This neologism which - as Federico Faloppa recalled in his essay 'Racist in words (to say nothing of the facts)' - he raged in newspapers and in common language starting from from the second half of the 1980s, it tends to disappear at the beginning of the nineties, as also certified by the bank data from Corriere della Sera which from 1993 to today records very few quotes. "Reconstructing the history of a word like vu cumprà - Rocco Luigi Nichil underlines - it may perhaps seem banal, but helps to restore depth to the story, overcoming the belief that everything we know has always existed and is destined to remain forever, as in a sort of eternity present".