It’s Cold Outside. Don’t Forget Your Goobalini.
“Look outside. It’s cold out there. Make sure you wear your goobalini.”
That’s a perfectly understandable thing you’d hear this time of year from moms at kitchen windows and front porches and back doors all over my hometown when I was a kid.
Or, with more urgency: “Gimme back my goobalini!” would echo through the playgrounds and schoolyards and back lots of our town all winter, as someone’s little brother endured a round of keepaway, that ancient rite of kid passage.
I know, I know. What’s a goobalini? you say. What the hell could that mean?
If you weren’t fortunate enough to grow up in my particular little Italian-American enclave in northeast New Jersey, you couldn’t know. But that’s okay—we won’t hold it against you, you chooch.
No harm meant, just a little ball-breaking, like the keepaway—in tune with the overall attitude of the place, an attitude that draws its feeling and flavor in no small part from the generations of people who have landed there from Calabria, Sicily, Naples, and the rest of southern Italy. Tough people, strong people, people who’ve left their stamp on the culture and on the language.
Goobalini: You probably call it a knit hat, a watch cap, a ski cap, or, God help you, a beanie. Nope. Where I’m from, the small town of Nutley—just north of Newark, tucked in tight between the Parkway and the Passaic River—that piece of winter wear is called a goobalini.
It’s a word forged in the same Italian-American crucible that’s given the world gabagool, madone, stunad, vaffanculo. A rich, expressive legacy, especially strong in food and profanity. The language of life.
Now, my family, we weren’t even Italian. Didn’t matter. We picked it up from the Bechellis and Ilarias and Apostolicos and Ferraras all around us. Everyone we knew said “goobalini.” And a lot of us, once we reached an age when we headed out into the wider world and came back at Thanksgiving or Christmas, would tell a similar story. Get this—in Pittsburgh/Chicago/Minneapolis/California, they don’t know what a goobalini is. Just a few towns over, in tony Montclair or leafy Glen Ridge, even they didn’t know. What the hell’s wrong with them?
Goobalini, you see, is special. It’s extreme—a hyper-local word. Not even a regionalism, it’s more like a townism. As near as I can tell, it seems to obtain only in a very small speaking zone, the red-hot center being Nutley, and to emanate out from there for only a few miles, maybe as far as Belleville, Bloomfield, North Newark, as if it couldn’t quite make it down the Turnpike or the Parkway and decided to head back home.
And unlike a lot of the Jersey-paisan words made famous on The Sopranos, which evolved from recognizable entries in the Italian lexicon, no one seems quite sure what the origin of goobalini is. An Italian scholar at nearby Seton Hall University consulted for this article had never heard of it, but offered that it could possibly be derived from a Sicilian word for “hat,” coppola. She also noted that a hard, concussive “c” often eases into a “g” sound in southern Italian dialects. So there’s that.
While pondering, the professor asked me how to spell it. “I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve only ever heard it spoken. I’ve never seen it written.” Goobalini is pre-literate. It exists outside the annals of scholarly dictionaries, beyond academic consideration, as pure language—a word in the wild. (I’ve gone full-on phonetic to render it here. Goobalini is just simply exactly how it sounds.)
Are there similar words hidden away out there in the world? Some relic of Old Norse hybridized and adapted to survive in a single village in Minnesota? We can only hope so. Because after all, what’s in a name? I don’t know the answer to the famous question, but I do know that words have value, words have a charge, words have a feel to them. There are good words and there are pony words. And goobalini is a good word. A fun word. A word for a cold and frosty winter morning, face pressed to the window and snow falling heavy outside, with the promise that maybe they’re gonna close school today! Better get your sled out and put on your goobalini.
That, all of that, is what goobalini means. And it’s gotta be why the word somehow stubbornly persists, alive and well and invoked with joy over generations in at least one small town in New Jersey.
Now go look outside. It’s cold out there. Make sure you wear your goobalini.
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