mani-pedi
mani-pedi – sostantivo numerabile
She gave me one of the best mani-pedis I’ve ever had.
I must get a mani-pedi before I head off on holiday.
If you’re a mani-pedi regular, you know how brittle and yellow those nails can get under all that glossy varnish.
Per oltre un secolo i termini manicure e pedicure seguirono ognuno il proprio corso (pedicure risale addirittura al 1784, mentre manicure al 1880. La domanda sorge spontanea: le signore inglesi del XIX secolo curavano solo i piedi? O forse per un centinaio d’anni la cura delle mani era chiamata pedicure per le mani??). Quando poi qualcuno ha avuto la brillante idea di offrire i due trattamenti igienico-estetici insieme, voilà l’espressione mani-pedi, parte della cultura del pampering (di cui parleremo in un altro post), cioè del coccolarsi, del viziarsi un po’ “Perché io valgo”, come recita un noto tormentone pubblicitario.
Origini del termine
Secondo l’Oxford Dictionary il termine mani-pedi –formato dall’abbreviazione di manicure e pedicure – fu usato per la prima volta dalla scrittrice filippina Kerima Polotan-Tuvera in un saggio del 1972 e la sua popolarità è andata crescendo nei decenni a seguire: cercando su Google si ottengono oltre 2 milioni e mezzo di risultati.
mani-pedi – countable noun
She gave me one of the best mani-pedis I’ve ever had.
I must get a mani-pedi before I head off on holiday.
If you’re a mani-pedi regular, you know how brittle and yellow those nails can get under all that glossy varnish.
A manicure is a beauty treatment for your hands, a pedicure is the same kind of thing for your feet, and for more than a century the two words maintained their separate courses (pedicure can be traced back to 1784 while the first record of manicure is from 1880, making me wonder whether 19th century ladies only looked after their feet and, if not, what the embellishment of the hands was called in English for the century before that – a pedicure for the hands, perhaps?). Then someone had the bright idea of providing the two treatments at the same time and the mani-pedi was born. It’s all part of the culture of pampering (‘Because I’m worth it’), another relatively new use on which more some other time.
Origins
Mani-pedi is formed by shortening the words manicure and pedicure and yoking them together. According to Oxford Dictionaries, the first use of the term was by the Filipino writer Kerima Polotan-Tuvera in an essay published in 1972. Its popularity has burgeoned in the decades since: a Google search for the term returns over 2.5 million hits.
