Ponte

Ponte
Photo by Matthew Waring / Unsplash

Hello and welcome to Word of the Week! I’m your host, Liz. This podcast is dedicated to words and phrases that are untranslatable into English. Let’s discover the nuance of the world’s languages, shall we?

This week’s word is ponte. An Italian word meaning ‘an extra day off, taken to add a weekend to a national holiday’. Such an Italian word, right? A culture that’s famous for the phrase ‘a domani’, meaning I’ll do it tomorrow. But we see this happening outside of Italy as well. 

Americans get the day off work for July 4th, but what happens if the 4th is a Tuesday or Thursday? There’s a strong pull to take that extra Monday or Friday off, in order to create a four-day weekend. In every office or factory, a certain percentage of the workforce somehow manages to arrange a personal or sick day a day before or after a national holiday. 

The word ponte literally means bridge. The Italians love this practice more than anybody else it seems. When you schedule a crucial all-day dentist appointment for Friday, when New Year’s Day is a Thursday, you’d be building a ponte. And managers are wise to the practice, sometimes making it less easy to construct these bridges. However, there’s always a motivated and talented cadre of what Italians call ‘pontisti’ or expert bridge-builders, who find a way. 

This is easily used in the English language, simply say ‘I’m building a ponte’ on a Wednesday afternoon and your colleagues will know exactly what you mean, if Friday is a holiday. Or when you run into a friend on a beach on a Monday before a Tuesday holiday, you could both shrug and say ‘I guess we’re both ponting today’. 

Here’s to this week… May you all endeavor to adopt this Word of the Week and see the world a little bit differently. I’ll be back next week with a new word. Thank you for listening!