Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [23]
In the standard language informal modes of address can serve as markers of inclusion and collegiality. Generally speaking, for example, even when speaking formal Italian-as lawyers, doctors, and academics are usually expected to do-professional colleagues will quickly adopt the informal pronoun tu; rejecting this by responding with the formal equivalent lei is a snub. At the very least, the polite form can convey a sense of social superiority, as when a bourgeois landlady addresses the local plumber as lei, combining this usage with the plumber's first name to ensure that the hierarchical implications of the polite address form remain unmistakable. When, on the other hand, male police officers use the informal to to a well-educated Latin American immigrant woman, and she remonstrates that this is inappropriate (especially as her papers are completely in order), the officers tell her that this is because she is from the third world; their contempt is woundingly casual.
In other contexts, it is the polite forms that wound. When the lawyer for a big real estate company carrying out a major eviction addressed the tenants' advocate with the polite form, the latter reacted angrily: he was a youthful but not inexperienced professional, a close kinsman of one of the residents and thus personally interested in the affair, and he felt that he was being deliberately put at a social disadvantage when he should instead have been treated as a nominal equal.
These usages have material as well as social implications. Tipping a waiter or barman who has used the informal idiom with the customer can be an insult; it rejects a gesture of equality and friendship and reinstates hierarchy. Bars are in fact important sites for the negotiation of masculine companionship, often through such linguistic niceties.45 An intimate-one who is de casa, literally, "of the house"-is charged only for drinking while standing at the bar even if he is seated at a table, where the official prices are higher. There is a rite of passage for achieving this desirable status; it entails getting someone who already has it to let the newcomer treat the veteran to a drink and so claim nominal equality. Both parties speak Romanesco; formal Italian would imply avoidance or rejection.
Even among those whose speech habitually comes closer to the national standard, a tiny change of accent-what linguists call "lenition" (a reduction of sonority) in the t in ti saluto (I greet you), for example-can signal intimacy beyond anything conveyed by the phrase itself. That phrase can also, in a formal accent, be a warning; a jeweler explained to me that he used it to mean "be well," but with the hint that the conversation should now end. "Ci vediamo" (See you!) is, he observed, a nicer (piu carino) way of saying the same thing. In the same way, "Dica" (tell me, a polite formula used to invite an order), said in a Roman accent and with a formal mien, can be a subtle device of exclusion rather than of friendliness.
Saying something apparently friendly but with slight tinges of potential irritation fits the Roman self-stereotype of collusive but occasionally tense social relations. Perhaps the most interesting example of this is also the shortest: Boh! is an expression of skepticism and perplexity. The jeweler, an astute commentator on dialect usage, suggested the gloss of "che ne so?" (literally, what do I know about it?) or "che me frega?" (what the frigging hell do I care?), but then pointed to an example right before us: a traffic policeman, faced with no less than three rows of illegally parked car, shook his head in despair and expostulated, "Boh!" before hastily taking himself off so that he would not have to attempt the impossible and risk a humiliating loss of authority-he evidently found the whole chaotic situation beyond him.
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