Sopranos actor Steve Schirripa celebrated the term in his 2002 book A Goomba’s Guide to Life. When Italian-Americans use the term among themselves, it signals affection and shared identity. In Japan, though, where the game was developed, goombas are called kuriboh, a form of the word for “chestnut.” Goombas are sentient brown mushrooms, easily defeated by jumping on their heads. Relatedly, goomba are minor antagonists in Nintendo’s Super Mario video games. The fictional representations of Italian-American organized crime/ Mafia culture helped transform goombah into a slang term for “thug” or “gangster” among outsiders, despite the term’s affectionate in-group use in Italian-American families and criminal underground cultures. It also was used in both the book (1969) and film (1972–90) versions of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and later in the Italian-American mob-themed HBO drama series The Sopranos (1999–2007). It also began to be used as an insult meaning “stupid person” more generally.īut, by the 1950s, Italian-American men were using goombah as a sign of affection between themselves, as seen in books like Robert Paul Smith’s The Time and the Place (1952), and Perspective (1956).Īccording to The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms, the term goombah probably garnered wider attention when it was used by boxer Rocky Graziano in 1955 during TV appearances. So, when Italian immigrants came to the United States (presumably using cumpà amongst themselves in conversation), some non-Italians began using goombah as a pejorative term to refer to their new Italian-American neighbors. Many Southern Italian pronunciations of this word sound like “goombah” to English speakers. The word goombah is an Anglicized version of the Italian phrase cumpà or compare, which means “friend” or “godfather.”
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