Mingya

Bobby Sulli said it, so did TJ and Paul and, worst of all, Pete, who had the bulk to back it up. 

A shiv of a word. Worse than the dirtiest hole in the body, worse than fighting with your mother after Mass, worse than saying Jesus f*cking Christ. A filthy word made all the more disgusting because no one agreed on what it meant. Mingya came from fathers and grandfathers who were no longer around, and there was the sense that its truest meaning was lost with those men, that the word was larger and more changeable than translation could allow. Dick, some said. Fuck. Poop. Balls. 

Mingya when your Chevy Nova won’t start, Mingya when someone calls you guinea, dago, or wop; Mingya when you oversleep and lose your job at Bay & Goodman Pizza; Mingya in mid-July when Debbie from down the street appears in cutoffs and a tube top. 

Mingya. An Americanism. Also spelled minkia or minchia. Created when Sicilians were the bottom of the barrel and needed such a word. Mingya. Modifier or noun, depending on the velocity with which it’s shot from the mouth. Occasionally reduced to a single syllable and delivered as one long streamer of air. Meeeeeh. 

Gone now from northeast Rochester, moved to the suburbs like the Sicilians, become a regional version of hot damn or holy shit. Gone now, except for uncles sipping Gennys, grandfathers inhaling the last bits of cigars under the cover of garage bays, and kids venturing new words. Gone now, like the bathtub Virgins and the Diplomat Party House.  

I neither used the word nor liked it as a child. My sister might have said it, but then, with her Sicilian father and pelt of black hair, the word was more Steph’s than mine. Like Maritza Rosas’ vete pa’l carajo! and Stacy Asberry’s hell naw. Because I had no decent word bombs of my own, I listened to others, made a study of up and down syllables, memorized every turn and hiss. 

These days, foul words are launched upon the hour. Trash talk dominates tweets and news feeds. Fuck off from elected officials. Shut up from the House floor. Slut and bitch in preachers’ video clips with a million likes. The word bombs fall and fall until they become so much wax in our ears.  

Mingya. It made you flinch to hear it slice the air. It made you grab a bar of Dial soap and wash out your own mouth; made you want your mother’s rosary to rub prayers into the beads. Mingya. It might still be whispered and earn a child a pop upside the head, but the word has lost the piss and vinegar of 1979. Mingya. I know it by heart. Mingya. It’s almost a sweetness now, those days when words were still big enough to make us blush. 

Sonja Livingston directs the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Her books include the award-winning memoir Ghostbread. Honors include an NYFA Nonfiction Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, a Virginia Faulkner Prize, and an AWP Prize. Recent essays appear in Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, and Ploughshares.   

This essay is a Short Reads original.