Embarrassing foreign Language Snafus, Illustrated

if you are a beginner Italian speaker, i might avoid making any disparaging comments about people’s roofs. In Italian, the word for roof is tetto, which happens to be very as regards to the Italian word tetta, which means tit. One misplaced vowel and it’s essential to find your self in a global of bother.

it’s a mistake that clothier Tom Gifford has made earlier than. “I’m continuously making errors with my Italian sadly. It’s a ravishing language, however now not the way in which I discuss it,” he writes in an e-mail. Gifford started learning Italian in order that he could speak to his spouse, Margherita, in her native language, however continuously got stuck on phrases that sounded the same but supposed notably various things. In his collection Badger Tax (Tasso Tasse in Italian) Gifford pairs up these phrases and illustrates the (continuously absurd) combos.

Gifford’s images are as extraordinary and whimsical as the newfangled phrases they depict. In “Exhibition Monster” (Mostra Mostro), for example, a creature wearing medieval garb and clutching a bow and arrow pops out of a frame. “Hair Hat” (Capello Cappello) is relatively actually simply hair (very, very unhappy hair) sporting a top hat.

“At coronary heart it’s all just a bit of fun, so I start with weird pairings of phrases and then attempt to visualize them as perfect i will,” Gifford says. and not using a finances to buy imagery, he sourced all of the original photography from the Flickr Commons archive, often letting the discovered photo guide his closing product. “different times i have a fairly clear idea in my head. With Roof Tit I knew early on precisely what imagery i wished.” In that one, as you might have guessed, the tettos seem like tettas.