Sucker Punch

I love words, and some of them stick to me like Velcro. One such word is punchinello. The word is from the Italian polecenella (a short, fat buffoon, principal character in Italian puppet shows). That word is the  diminutive of pollecena (Italian for turkey pullet) because a punchinello's beaky nose looks like a turkey’s beak. 

Now that we know where the word came from, how shall we use it?

I had one of those Punch and Judy toys when I was a kid. 

It looked like this, but much simpler. Punchinello was the guy on the left with the big schnozz and the sugarloaf hat, who appeared in puppet shows with his wife Judy. They were always slugging each other, and of course, Punch always gets the worst of it in the end, usually getting punched (so that's where that comes from!) with his own cudgel.

You might have heard Punchinello mentioned on The Simpsons, in the "Like Father, Like Clown" episode of season 3 (episode 6, October 24, 1991.) That's the show in which Krusty The Klown (né Herschel Krustofsky) finally comes over to the Simpsons' for dinner and reveals his sadness over his estrangement from his father, the noted Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky. Feeling the need to sing for his supper, Krusty begins klowning around, and Homer encourages him to do so, until Lisa says, "No Dad, Krusty is our guest. Your pratfalls and Punchinello antics aren't necessary here."

Sometimes when people are really being clownish, intentionally or not, the word Punchinello comes to my mind. Sometimes, the right word just trumps all others.