stunod

Definition

Stupid or crazy; out of touch with reality.

Etymology

Italian-American immigrant slang; dialectal and derived from Southern Italian languages. In standard Italian it would be Italian stonato (“out of tune”). However, in the first half of the 20th century, the largely Southern Italian emigrants to America did not speak the Florentine dialect that modern Standard Italian is based upon and instead used the Sicilian stunatu or the Neapolitan stunato. The Italian-American meaning is nearly identical to the meaning in Sicilian and Neapolitan, though in Sicilian and Neapolitan stunatu and stuntato can also simply mean “out of tune” as well. The word stoned (“exhilarated, intoxicated by substances”) is often theorized to be a phono-semantic matching from stunod.

Example Sentences

• "If I was acting particularly spacey, my mother would ask, “Are you stunod?”"
• "“Do you understand me? Are you stunod?” my mother would say. Stunod. Someone who is out-of-it, spacey, not a practical person who knows that life is labor and that only the sturdy can get the job done."
• "“The stunod commander, a German Commodore no less, decides that there's just too many ships in the Gulf, and he doesn't have the manpower to search everyone of them.”"