direttorazzo

[jim10701]

I have a question about another word from a Fellini movie. The movie is Orchestra Rehearsal (Prova d'orchestra), and the word is in graffiti being written on a wall outside the conductor's room by one of the musicians during a break in the rehearsal. (The relationship in the movie between the conductor and the musicians is stormy.) The full text is "direttorazzo dirigi sto' cazzo" (It's written with all capitals in the movie, but the guidelines say not to do that here). The English subtitle says, "take your stick and conduct my prick," which I suspect is a loose translation meant to convey the bawdiness, irreverence and rhyme rather than the literal meaning. Can somebody give me a good literal translation, particularly of the word direttorazzo, which I can't find on this site or anywhere else online.

I assume it's a modification of direttore, which I think is equivalent to the English conductor in this context. I'd like to know if direttorazzo is a real word in Italian (I suspect Fellini of taking liberties with language as he does with reality), and if it is, how it's related to direttore. Does adding -azzo to a word mean something specific, or is its only function to create the rhyme with cazzo?

I'm very much interested in how words are modified to make new words, if that even happens in Italian as much as it does in English. I hope this isn't an annoying question. My curiosity about Italian far exceeds my knowledge.

 

[Nerino]

Well, I guess the use of what we call, grammatically speaking, the "peggiorativa" form of the noun, is there just to rhyme with the following noun ending in the same way (but not on grammar grounds!). Direttorazzo means therefore "bad/unskilled director", the english translation of the rest of the sentence sounds perfect to me. Bye!

 

[Necsus]

Yes, adding -azzo you mean something specific, it is a pejorative suffix from Latin -aceus. E.g. codazzo, from coda, means swarm, train.
And yes, direttore = conductor.

Oops...crossing...

 

[jim10701]

Thanks very much. Those answers are exactly what I needed. I love seeing how Italian developed from Latin. I studied Latin for many years, and when I first discovered Italian I was amazed at how similar the two languages seem to be, much more similar than Old English and Modern English are, for example.