WTN: morbido
James Harbeck
morbido
I don’t often do tastings on non-English words, but this Italian word has always had an interestingly contrasty flavour for me, particularly because I come to it as an English speaker.
I should say, first, that the stress in this word is on the first syllable: “mor-bido.” So you really get that “more” sound. But in the context I usually hear it in, it’s not the mournful “mor” of a mortuary; in fact, it’s rather moreish. You see, I hear it mainly in cooking videos.
No, let me explain. I like to watch cooking videos in Italian. This is because (a) I like Italian food and (b) I like practicing my Italian comprehension. And this is specifically not because the videos are of cooking, uh, morbid things. I mean, yes, there are often dead animals in them (or anyway pieces thereof), but the morbidity and mortality are absolutely not the focus. So why am I hearing morbido? Because it means ‘soft’.
That’s right, it’s what we call a “false friend” – a word that resembles one English word but means a different one. A common example is French travailler, which resembles ‘travel’ but means ‘work’. Often people call these “false cognates,” but beware: not all false friends are false cognates. A false cognate is where two words appear to have the same etymological origin but don’t. A classic example is that cognate is a false cognate with cognitive – the two don’t come from the same root; cognate is from co ‘together’ and gnatus ‘born’ (from a root we also see as gen- as in generation and genital), while cognitive comes from co plus gnitivus, which is derived from gnosco ‘I know’. On the other hand, travel and travailler are not false cognates; they really do have the same origin, but they went in different directions: the Latin etymon was a word for a kind of torture, and the English used it as a word for voyaging while the French used it as a word for work. (Make what cultural inferences you will about that. Anyway, English also borrowed it separately as travail.)
OK, so is morbido a false cognate with morbid? No, it is not. Both words come from Latin morbidus, ‘sickly, diseased’ (which in turn comes from morbus, ‘disease’, which draws on the same mor- root as mortality). In English (and in several other languages), it kept that sense or at least stayed in the same sphere; we now commonly use morbid to refer to a focus on decay, disease, and especially death, but the medical term morbidity refers specifically to occurrences of illness, not of death – the collocation morbidity and mortality refers to bad things that happen in the course of medical treatment, both sickness (morbidity) and death (mortality). Whereas an Italian chef uses morbido to refer to good things – specifically soft ones – that come up in the course of cooking.
So… does that mean that Italians have, or anyway had, a negative attitude towards soft food? As though perhaps it is only for the invalid and valetudinarian? No, it seems not; rather, it was that disease and decay are associated with weakness and lack of strength and firmness, and so it came to mean that, and then it lost its negative tone and took on a positive one to mean ‘soft’, ‘docile’, ‘smooth’, ‘not rigid’. As the website Una parola al giorno puts it, “È uno degli esempi più splendidi di parola che si sia emancipata totalmente dalla sua origine scura e spiacevole, diventando una luce sensoriale potente, gradevole e gradita” (It’s one of the most splendid examples of a word being totally emancipated from its dark and unpleasant origin, becoming a powerful, pleasant, and welcome light to the senses).
It is not, after all, that morbido is used only for soft food; a pillow may also be so (“un cuscino morbido” is not only for your death bed), and, as Garzanti tells us, many other things may be called morbido (or, for feminine nouns, morbida): hair, fabric, skin, wine (smooth and well balanced), paintings (harmonious and delicate), personal character (tolerant, agreeable, sequacious even)…
All of which inevitably seems a bit odd to my ear, and I can’t get around it. I’m simply too habituated to my English associations. The result is a dissonance that may not be morbid but is not morbido either. Meanwhile, to the person who grew up speaking Italian, the English use of morbid may also seem odd, perhaps feeling that when we talk of “morbid humour” and “morbid TV shows” and so on we have an eye on the cushions in the coffin and the softness of decay. On the other hand, they can associate it with the word morboso, which does mean ‘morbid’ or ‘sick’.
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