Italian word of the day: 'Stupidaggine'

Sometimes, when you’re scrambling to think of the Italian word for something and are failing miserably, there’s a temptation to just throw out the English with an extra vowel added on the end and see where it gets you.

Most of the time the answer is: not far.

But ‘stupid’ is one of those words which can in fact be Italianised with the simple addition of an ‘o’, ‘a’, ‘i’ or ‘e’ (depending on whether the subject is masculine or feminine, singular or plural):

È la cosa più stupida di cui abbia mai sentito parlare.
It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of.

Pensi che io sono uno stupido?
Do you think I'm an idiot?

Italian, however, goes one better than English in that it creates a whole extra noun out of the word that doesn’t exist at all for anglophones: stupidaggine (hear it pronounced here).

It means something like a piece of rubbish, nonsense, foolishness – in short, a stupid/trivial little thing, not worth wasting your time on.

Questa è una stupidaggine e lo sai benissimo.
This is nonsense and you know that full well.

Sicuramente entro domani si sarà scordata di questa stupidaggine.
By tomorrow she'll definitely have forgotten this foolishness.

Unlike any of its English equivalents, stupidaggine is a countable noun, which means it also exists in the plural form, stupidaggini - in fact, you'll probably more commonly hear it used in the plural than the singular form.

Non ne posso più delle sue stupidaggini.
I've had enough of his nonsense.

Non ho tempo per affrontare questi stupidaggini.
I don't have time to deal with this rubbish.

It’s such a pleasing word to say that once you get the hang of it, you’re liable to find yourself using it all the time (not to mention questioning why English doesn’t really have a word for ‘stupid little thing/s’).

But stupidaggine isn’t the only Italian word meaning 'stupidities' that has a nice cadence to it.

There’s also sciocchezze (shock-ETZ-eh), the plural of sciocchezza (shock-ETZ-a), which means more or less exactly the same thing as stupidaggini.

Smettila di dire sciocchezze.
Stop saying ridiculous things.

Ho commesso una sciocchezza.
I did something stupid.

Like stupidaggini, sciocchezze comes from another word: sciocco, which can be used either as an adjective, meaning silly or foolish, or as a noun, meaning fool (stupido can also be used either as an adjective of a noun in Italian).

Then there's the less common scemenze, the plural of scemenza, which comes from the noun/adjective scemo, and again is more or less interchangeable with both stupidaggini and sciocchezze.

Che scemenze ho detto ieri sera?
What nonsense did I spout last night?

Finally, there's the more vulgar cazzate, the plural for cazzata - it's very commonly used in colloquial Italian, but you'll want to watch who you say it around because it's closer to 'bullshit' than 'foolishness'.

Scusa, sono allergica alle cazzate.
Sorry, I'm allergic to bullshit.

So next time you go on a fool's errand to the comune with the aim of completing some bureaucratic task, only to be sent home because you're missing a photocopy of a previously unmentioned document, at least you'll have the vocabulary complain about it.

Is there an Italian word of expression you’d like us to feature? If so, please email us with your suggestion.