She said hers is “scoppiare” (popcorn)! She rapidly responded when I asked her favorite word. It was as though she too has spent several hours thinking about fabulous words. My Italian friend is a linguist in Emilia-Romagna, Italia. She loves words too she told me. Munching on the goodness from farms in middle America and popcorn is one of our favorite snacks when my daughter and I watch movies. We love popcorn or scoppiare. Maybe Italians do too?! Who knew. Nebraskans do too. So much so that corn is a mascot for many schools and sports teams in my beautiful state of Nebraska where we have lived since 2021.
My Italian friend spent a year in Maine, but she has never been to Nebraska. I’m pretty sure she had no idea that I come from the land of popcorn in the Midwest. We played the favorite word game during train rides in Italy. Sounds like the kind of game I would initiate, but it was another friend from Florida who started us playing this game. When you travel for 2 weeks with several early childhood educators in Italy, you are likely to learn new games to play with friends. And play we did! I got to learn my friends’ faves and shared my favorite word (of the moment) as I stared out the train windows and thought about how the gorgeous Italian countryside reminds me of my home in Nebraska.
I see many similarities between Nebraska and the Emilia-Romagna (E-R) region of Italy. The eastern part of the E-R region, Emilia, is flat. Eastern E-R looks to me a lot like eastern Nebraska. The Nebraska poet Ted Kooser described eastern Nebraska as a flat table that has a wobbly leg. Not quite flat, but not quite hilly or mountainous either. Just a little tilted. The east is also where a bulk of the population of people live in E-R which is similar to Nebraska.
As you travel west to the Romagnan part of the E-R region it gets less populated and the countryside is painted with jagged hills. Western E-R is similar to western NE where places like Scottsbluff and Chimney Rock in the west have different landscapes compared to eastern NE. In Nebraska, we don’t have a sea at our border like the Adriatic. But wow do we have an amazeballs river. Oh the river! Po River runs through E-R and we have the Platte River in Nebraska.
Still thinking about our word game while I traveled home and spent 33 hours in shuttles, cars, and on planes. It was a gate agent from Lufthansa in Munich airport who gave me my new favorite word.
He asked for my passport. I gave my passport to him in a little booklet I picked up in the Bologna airport that says, “Wanderlust.” The only reason I bought the booklet with the wanderlust word on it was because I wanted privacy with my identity and not flash the precious blue passport revealing to other passengers my country of origin. Safety!
“Sprechen sie Deutsch,” he asked loudly. When he questioned me, I experienced flashbacks to 9th grade when I took Frau Ruth Strange’s class to learn to speak German.
Umm. Does a year and a grade of “D” count as speaking Deutsch? I kept that pesky thought to myself. “No. English. I speak English,” I said.
A spunky smile accompanied his reply in English as he pointed to the word on the booklet that covers my passport. “Okay. I ask because wanderlust is German.” This is how he started telling me about the word. His enthusiasm for Deutsch got me excited for learning more about the language that I sadly gave up on when I was 14. German. How cool!
When it comes to words, I am like the bread Italians use to soak up sauce on the plate. There’s a phrase for it in Italian, fare la scarpetta (little shoe for bread). Licking the dish clean and leaving no sauce behind. I have a fondness and hunger to soak up words. Nothing pleases me more than to hear people talk and pay attention to the words they use. Love to read their writing too.
Malcom Gladwell wrote an essay about mustard and ketchup in David Remnick’s book, “Secret Ingredients.” In his essay, Gladwell described someone’s enthusiasm for a topic. I loved the words he used that went something like… the person is so charismatic they make you want to become a statistician after taking their required stats class. I know people like this. Do you? The Munich gate agent could be one of them.
Grinning gate agent is not a statistician (that I am aware of) but his contagious zest for Deutsch interested me. I developed a curiosity for “wanderlust.” What is wanderlust? Where does wanderlust come from? How is wanderlust used in sentences?
I’ll explore this more later when I have time, but for now while I write this on the treadmill at my gym and construct my own meaning I’m going to settle on this personal definition that I create for myself. My definition of wanderlust is…
Wander + lust = being seduced by the possibilities of travel.
I think of wanderlust as a secret ingredient when going someplace and comparing new worlds to home. Can’t help but make comparisons. “Take me home, country roads,” sang John Denver. Wanderlust with winding roads can take us places and also lead us back home. In classrooms we sometimes say “popcorn” when we toss a question or idea to our friend. What is your favorite word? Popcorn! Yes, you! Scoppiare to you. Mine could change by the time I push the submit button. I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours. Over to you.
All roads lead home. Wanderlust brought me here. Being myselfie and getting lost on a winding country road in Reggio Emilia, Italia.
Gladwell, M. (2008). The ketchup conundrum. In D. Remnick, Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink (Ed.). Random House.