2553: Calzones and Underpants Dec 9, 2021

The pizza-dish known as 'calzone' in Italian means 'stocking; trouser' certainly does not mean the same thing as it does in Italian, but across other romance languages there is another level of semantic distinction. In Italian 'calzoni' these days means 'trousers', but in Spanish 'calzón' means 'underpants'. Even in languages developed later from these Romance languages don't always retain the meanings, with this distinction seen in the Papiamento word for trousers 'kalzon', taken from the Spanish 'calzón' (underpants).