At Rosebank mall in Johannesburg

all 33 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 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!

  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] [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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 31 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 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."

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 28 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Fugazi is an old punk band.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago* (7 children)

    I was not aware fugazzi meant anything in Italian (and I'm a native speaker). I think it just sounds Italian. Maybe it's a last name.

  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] [S] -1 points 2 months ago (6 children)
  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Interestingly Wiktionary weakly supports my hunch that it was a last name.

    Uncertain; said to be of Mafia origin, from the Fugazy Continental limousine company in New York City which was owned by William “Bill” Fugazy, due to its cheesy “look like a rich guy” advertisements of the 1970s and 1980s, or its alleged poor business practices,[1] possibly influenced by Sicilian fu cazzu (“it was nothing”). The word was popularized by the film Donnie Brasco (1997), based on the book Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia (1987) by American former FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone (born 1939) who used the name “Donnie Brasco” as an undercover alias. First use in English appears c. 1974 in the novel Bones of Contention by Nicholas Gage. Adjective

    fugazi

    (US, slang) Fake. 
    
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago*

    I wonder if it is related or not, here in argentina we call "fugaza" to a variety of pizza manily made with cheese and onions.

    Edit: i just saw the menu of that place, i'm 100% sure it is not related to our fugaza

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

    Also US military slang for something going catastrophically wrong, from “fucked up, got ambushed, zipped in”

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    There's a chain of (mediocre) pizza places by the same name here too.

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