At Rosebank mall in Johannesburg

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[–] 52 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Hi! Italian is my mother tongue, and "Fugazzi" is not a word.

There are many ways to say "counterfeit": the standard word is "contraffatto", but there are also many colloquial terms such as "tarocco", "patacca" and more. If you're kinda racist you can say "cinesata" which means "trash from china".

According to my brief research Fugazzi is a brand of perfumes, and probably a surname...

According to google, fugazzi is used to mean "counterfeit" in the italian american community, and was popularized by the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.

Hope this helps!

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    I thought the Z was just a fancy written one, not a double one. According to my search:

    fugazi

    adjective

    1. not genuine; bogus or false

    Example: the stealing was first noticed when the fugazi bills began popping up in the bank deposits

    noun

    1. a thing that is not genuine; a pretence or sham

    Example: it's all a big fugazi. He's used it as a ruse to sell a lot of stock

    My first search came with "counterfeit" as first translation.

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  • [–] 31 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    What I was trying to say is that that's not Italian. It's US English :)

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Since you said it was possibly a surname, my guess is that someone named Fugazi was a well known counterfeiter for the mob, and the Italian Americans started using it as slang.

    https://lemmy.zip/comment/28532982

    According to this, I was almost right. He owned a limousine rental service with the ad tag line, "look like a rich guy." So he was creating "fake riches."

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