Mansplain It To Me

I was in the grocery store the other day searching for some of those mini mozzarella balls. I stood in front of the glass fridge doors, staring at all manner of scrumptious Italian cheese, but couldn’t find the one thing I was looking for.

I leaned over toward the store clerk who was restocking the nearby shelves. “Excuse me, can you tell me where the mozzarelline are?” He cocked his head. “Mozzarelline? The small ones?” I clarified.

“Ah,” he said, “come with me.” I followed him over to a different bay of fridges where the mozzarella balls were hiding. “We call them ciliegine, by the way,” he said with a smile and a wink as he walked off.

I exhaled. Not only because I had found the last ingredient for my salad, but also because this was a rare (rare!) example of a friendly, gentle correction from a native Italian speaker. I wasn’t lectured or patronized. I was, instead, offered a kind and generous piece of information that was eminently useful to me.

This is not, I’m afraid, the type of intervention I usually receive in Italy—or, more specifically, from Italian men.

I started joking a few months ago that a sudden epidemic of mansplaining had arrived, quite rudely, in my life.

Whenever I was being imprecise or even a bit sloppy with my words or actions, I’d receive an unsolicited lecture of sorts. The sea is different from the ocean. 🙄 When you got a flat on your bike ride, you went about fixing it all wrong. 😐 Not all sparking wine is Champagne, which only comes from the Champagne region of France. 🙃 This rolling vehicle that runs on steel tracks is not a train, but a subway. 🆗

Were all these corrections really necessary?

I bristled at each of them. Sometimes, because I already knew I was wrong and that I misspoke. Other times, because we could have fully understood each other based on context, without needing to stop for a clarification.

Also, for the record, I grew up in New Jersey where all of the salty water is an ocean and you’d sound wildly pretentious calling anything a “sea.” But not so in Italy, where the Adriatic or Mediterranean are, indeed, seas. Once again, 🆗. But would it really derail the conversation to just let me be a little wrong while discussing the salty body of water in front of us??

I feel a couple ways about these recurring experiences. One the one hand, fuck offfff. On the other hand, maybe they have a point.

I do often need to correct my language, especially as I learn a foreign one. When I shared the mozzarella anecdote on Instagram, an Italian man slid into my DMs to note that, to add to my errors, I had also spelled “mozzarelline” incorrectly. Fucking hell. I told him he was entirely proving my point, that Italians are way too pedantic.

Not so, he argued; it was just a tendency to be helpful, a love of language that compelled Italians to help foreigners get it right. 😐 Maybe. But there’s a way to do these things.

I care a lot about the Italian language. I’ve spent the last six months working through an Italian textbook in my free time. I’m currently reading an Italian novel. I speak Italian at every opportunity. I paid for private Italian lessons for weeks on end. I care about getting it right, too. (To his credit, the Italian man in my DMs backed down once I explained all of this).

I’m not always open, however, to these tiniest of corrections. Why? I mean, sometimes it is just straight-up mansplaining, cut and dry. But other times, my negative reaction can be out of proportion with the event itself.

I’m trying to ask myself where this comes from. My receptiveness seems to depend a lot on context. The grocery boy’s intervention was welcome because I was already asking for help (even if not on the topic of language), and his correction was kind, substantial and useful. But when a lecture interrupts an otherwise functional conversation? That tends to grind my gears.

I also just hate being wrong. I know this about myself. I’ve been known to dig in my heels. I inherit my stubbornness from my mom’s side, specifically my Grandpa Joe. It’s a proud family heirloom, passed down through the generations.

This would seem to be a most Italian trait. And yet, it does not serve me very well in my daily life as a foreigner in Italy. Living abroad requires an immense level of flexibility. Every day, things go sideways. I am constantly getting this wrong, adapting, getting this wrong again, switching course. It’s exhausting.

Maybe this is why I get so peeved at these little corrections. Can’t I just have one thing?? When I’m constantly getting rerouted through byzantine bureaucracies, or struggling to accomplish the most basic of tasks, sometimes the last thing I want is an unsolicited lesson on the finer points of language.

This week, I leave you with yet another film photo from Greece.