Highway 61
Revisited
[The word "paparazzi" is an eponym originating in the 1960 film La Dolce Vita directed by Federico Fellini. One of the characters in the film is a news photographer named Paparazzo (played by Walter Santesso). In his book "Word and Phrase", Robert Hendrickson writes that Fellini took the name from an Italian dialect word that describes a particularly annoying noise, that of a buzzing mosquito*. As Fellini said in his interview to Time Magazine : "Paparazzo ... suggests to me a buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging." Those versions of the word's origin are confirmed by Treccani, the most authoritative Italian encyclopaedia, but sometimes contested. For instance, in the Abruzzi dialect spoken by Ennio Flaiano, co-writer of La Dolce Vita, the term "paparazzo" refers to the local clam (Venerupis decussata : cross-cut carpet shell), and is also used as a metaphor for the shutter of a camera lens.
The English usage of the word paparazzo is traced to Italian poet Margherita Guidacci, in her translation of George Gissing’s travel book "By the Ionian Sea" (1901), in which a restaurant owner is called Coriolano Paparazzo. The name was supplied by the screenwriter of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, Ennio Flaiano, who in turn got it from Margherita Guidacci's "Sulla riva dello Jonio" (1957). By the late 1960s the word, usually in the Italian plural form paparazzi, had entered English as a generic term for intrusive photographers. A person who has been photographed by the paparazzi is said to have been papped.]
*in this case papparazzo (with two p) would be a new word forged from pappatacio (small mosquito) and ragazzo (young man).
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paparazzi
