graffiti

자료: Word Origins, http://www.answers.com/topic/graffiti

from Italian
This word originated in Italy

In ancient Rome, when you had a written message for the public, you scratched it on a wall. What else could you do? You didn't have a fax machine, a photocopier, or the World Wide Web. You couldn't even take out an ad in a newspaper.

The walls of Pompeii, preserved for two thousand years under volcanic ash, are marked with numerous examples of this Roman custom. Here are some translated graffiti:

• Successus was here.
• Gaius Julius Primigenius was here. Why are you late?
• Lovers, like bees, lead a honey-sweet life.
• I don't want to sell my husband.
• Burglar, watch out!
• Someone at whose table I do not dine, Lucius Istacidius, is a barbarian to me.
• The fruit sellers ask you to elect Marcus Holconius Priscus as aedile.
• I am amazed, o wall, that you have not collapsed and fallen, since you must bear the tedious stupidities of so many scrawlers.

The custom of wall writing has occurred worldwide and continues to the present, though advances in the technology of paint have made it more of an opportunity both for art and for defacement on a grand scale. But it was the example of Pompeii that gave the world, and the English language, an Italian word for it: graffiti. The word was used in English as early as 1851 with regard to runic inscriptions in Orkney, and in 1873 with regard to Greek poets: "Even the Graffiti of Pompeii have scarcely more power to reconstruct the past." In Italian, graffiti is the plural of graffito meaning "a scratch," so purists in English distinguish "one graffito" from "many graffiti."

Many hundreds of words besides graffiti have migrated from Italian to English. Most numerous are the musical terms, everything from opera (1644) to piano (1803). But there is also the language of business, including manager (1588), tariff (1591), and bankrupt (1533), and such other words as miniature (1586), bandit (1593), umbrella (1609), ghetto (1611), portfolio (1722),dilettante (1723), and studio (1819), not to mention foods like broccoli (1699), pasta (1874), andcaffe latte (1927).

Italian is a Romance language, that is, a descendant of Latin, belonging to the Italic branch of our Indo-European language family. Nearly seventy million people speak Italian nowadays, including fifty-seven million in Italy, a million and a half in Argentina, and about a million each in France and in the United States.