It’s confusing, being an “Italian American” visiting the homeland for the first time. The culinary staples of your childhood are only available in the most touristy trattorie, and it’s honestly difficult to find that superlative meal you were promised. You wander around Milan or Naples and wonder why your idiot of an ancestor decided that Staten Island was a better idea. And you don’t know nearly as much of the language as you think you do.

This final point will inevitably come as a surprise; it won’t happen immediately. You’ll think that your 500-day DuoLingo streak is paying off, and then bam—you drop a word into the conversation that you’ve been using since your grandma taught it to you as you sat in your high chair and none of the Italians you’re talking to know what it means. There’s the usual suspects for this, mostly derived from linguistic drift out of a Sicilian dialect: gagootz for “cacuza” (a type of squash), pasta fazool for “pasta e fagioli” (pasta and beans). Mine was a bit different.

In the course of a conversation, I said “pasquale passaguai,” which I knew to mean “you moron.” It was an easy phrase to use, as literally everyone in my extended family said it regularly and with great gusto.

Around the large farmhouse table in Umbria, it was met with a polite, patronizing silence and then, after what seemed to be an interminable gap, a confused Che? I repeated the phrase more slowly, but no one had heard it before. No one had heard anything like it before. The conversation moved on, and I ruefully concluded that my poor grandma had taught me gibberish as part of another confused attempt to make a coherent identity for herself in the American melting pot.

Half a decade later, in the middle of a global pandemic, I was teasing apart a linguistic argument as I steadily wrote my dissertation. It was an onomastic problem: a wealthy layman named Peter Torraci (Peter Short-tower) had been collaborating with the syndic for the monastery of Grandselve to build a protected section next to Toulouse’s city wall for the benefit of the university there. But some of the documents said that the syndic was instead working with a Peter Pascal—were these two Peters the same?

I repeated the phrase more slowly, but no one had heard it before. No one had heard anything like it before.

They were, it turned out. It wasn’t a hard problem to solve. But the name “Pascal” stuck in my head; in the original Occitan it was Pasquale—Easter. While I was here, maybe I should look into that weird gibberish that my grandma had taught me.

This was, it turned out, also not a hard problem to solve. It took no more than two simple Google searches to get the answer. My grandma’s phrase wasn’t gibberish, but it also didn’t technically mean anything. It was just some guy’s name.

At the turn of the last century, Pasquale Passaguai (Pascal Always-In-Trouble) was a clown. Literally. It was the stage name of Pasquale De Angelis (d. 1880), also known as Pasquale Barliotto (Pascal Little-Barrel [of laughs, perhaps?]). Primarily performing in the south of Italy, he was commonly seen on the stage in Naples, the primary port for departure for immigrants to the Americas. Several of my own ancestors followed that route, and it’s not hard to imagine my great-grandfather seeing a copycat “Pasquale Passaguai” act as his final farewell to the only home he had known and as some joy to fortify him for the journey ahead.

Pasquale’s specialty was, as his name suggests, slapstick. He was a goof, always blundering into comedic injury. And so it’s similarly easy to think that my great-grandfather, whenever he saw some dolt or fool, would refer to them as the performer of that last, memorable show he had seen before he sailed for the new world. Pasquale Passaguai! —You budget Charlie Chaplin impersonator!

Memory is transitory, quick to vanish; it’s also generational.

Memory is a funny thing. It’s incredibly strong, yet easily corrupted, bent into a shape more pleasing to its curator. It’s transitory, quick to vanish; it’s also generational. I doubt very much that Pasquale would have ever thought his name would persist for more than a century and a half on the far side of two oceans as an exasperated insult. And yet it has.

I did my grandma a disservice, a decade ago around that table in Umbria. She was a good and loving grandma, on the whole, but she was not an educated woman. She married young and worked as a security guard for New York City’s public schools. And so I dismissed her memory as corrupted nonsense, a sort of folk construction of language as a claim to an identity—Italian—that she never really possessed.

In recent years, Western scholars and intellectuals have been doing a bit better when it comes to incorporating “nonstandard” (i.e. non-academic) approaches to knowing into our existing ontological structures. We’ve even started to do this responsibly, developing methods that incorporate other voices as peers, rather than mere sources to be exploited. But as public historians have long screamed at their more esoteric colleagues, these are not just approaches to be deployed on those outside the center. They need guide our approach to White octogenarians on Staten Island as much as our treatment of sacred indigenous knowledge and practices.

It’s not an easy process, to change an entire culture’s approach to knowing. We’ll muddle through, bumping into doors and tripping over our own feet, muttering, perhaps, in frustration as we do: Pasquale Passaguai.