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One way to understand these trends, Aboulafia told me, is through the industry’s most beloved metric: the seat mile. If a plane with 300 available seats flies 1
by prower 6y ago
One way to understand these trends, Aboulafia told me, is through the industry’s most beloved metric: the seat mile. If a plane with 300 available seats flies 1,000 miles, that flight clocks up 300,000 seat miles. Airlines are constantly comparing revenue per available seat mile, or Rasm, with cost per available seat mile, or Casm. Aboulafia, pronouncing these terms as “razzum” and “cazzum”, said: “As long as razzum is a nose above cazzum, you’re happy.”
If you're an Italian speaker, this can be very funny and ironic.
- tda 6y agoplease enlighten us non-Italians
- prower 6y ago"Ad cazzum" is a sort of fake latinism, to say (in a sort of fake-courtly language) that something has been done/said/thought in a totally random way with no planning at all. Doing something "ad cazzum" means, generally, that you've just done it without even the slightest hint of thinking before acting.
- eecc 6y agoYou should also add that “cazzo” is Italian for “dick” and “alla cazzo di cane” is vulgar for something done in a hurry, bumbling along as you go... (and if you close your eyes for a moment and imagine a dog happily strolling along you get the picture)
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoAlso note that English speakers would pronounce the double-zed in "razzum" and "cazzum" as "z", whereas in Italian it's pronounced more as "ts" (i.e. "catso", not "cazo"). Additionally, the "u" in "cazzum" should be silent in an Englsh accent, but clearly spoken in Italian: "caz'm" as opposed to "cah-zoom". (Speaking as a non-native speaker of both languages and having spent a lot more time in an English-speaking country than in Italy).
- Uberphallus 6y agoI think most English speakers know how to pronounce the Italian zz given the ubiquity of the word pizza (pitsa).
- samatman 6y agoYou might be underestimating how weird English orthography is. If you know some Italian, then you'll know that words are pronounced the way they're spelled. If what you know is English, there's no reason to think the zz in pizza and the zz in cazzum are pronounced the same way.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoAs a native English speaker, I second this. But I'm also a low-grade language nerd. It drives me nuts when I see Latin-to-English loan words with inappropriate declinations, or fancy-sounding technical/medical terms formed by combining Latin and Greek word fragments [0]. So maybe my attention to correct pronunciation is atypical. [0] I'm not claiming that I'm actually correct in all these cases; just that I go nuts at what I perceive to be bad treatment of loan words.
- Uberphallus 6y agoI don't know, if you tell native English speakers that "cazzo" is Italian, I assume they know it's pronounced catso. Of course if they find cazzo in the wild without context it'll be like the zz in "buzzard". But then again, some people may think pizza is American and not make the link.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago> I don't know, if you tell native English speakers that "cazzo" is Italian, I assume they know it's pronounced catso. You could be right. My experience is mostly from the New England area, near areas with a lot of first-third generation Italian immigrants.