street
street – aggettivo
Their music is still very street but there’s a little touch of something more universal.
For a while Converse trainers were seen as very street.
At six months pregnant she is still street, still beautiful and looks amazing in a tight dress.
I can’t help spotting new fashion trends, whether it’s in a magazine or street style.
The project had a street vibe and strong political ambitions.
È nota la facilità con cui in inglese avviene lo spostamento di una parola da una parte del discorso all’altra ed è anche noto che un sostantivo molto spesso può svolgere funzione di modificatore di un altro sostantivo: la parola street incarna queste due caratteristiche. Come modificatore si combina con una varietà di nomi per formare composti tipo i recenti street food, street fashion, street smart(s), street style e persino Street View di Google.
A volte, come abbiamo visto in vari post precedenti, un sostantivo prende un’altra strada e diventa un aggettivo a tutti gli effetti, cioè assume funzione attributiva o predicativa e può essere modificato da un avverbio, proprio com’è successo a street. Con funzione di aggettivo significa più o meno: ‘tipico o rappresentativo della vita e dello stile della cultura giovanile urbana’, con connotazioni positive di originalità, dell’essere cool e del fare tendenza.
Origini del termine
L’uso aggettivale di street data almeno dai primi anni 2000, quando si impiegava principalmente per descrivere la cultura urbana dei giovani di colore americani.
Traduzione di Loredana Riu
street – adjective
Their music is still very street but there’s a little touch of something more universal.
For a while Converse trainers were seen as very street.
At six months pregnant she is still street, still beautiful and looks amazing in a tight dress.
I can’t help spotting new fashion trends, whether it’s in a magazine or street style.
The project had a street vibe and strong political ambitions.
It’s a well-established feature of English that words can change class with great ease. Another well-known feature of English is that nouns can modify other nouns with no difficulty. The very common noun street exhibits both of these characteristics. As a noun modifier it combines with a wide range of nouns to form what are effectively new compounds in the making: some fairly recent examples are street food, street fashion, street smart(s), street style and even Google’s Street View.
Sometimes, as we have seen in previous posts, a noun modifier will break free of its constraints to become a fully functioning adjective. This is what happened to street at some point: it became an adjective with its own distinct meaning, one that can be used both attributively and predicatively and also modified by an adverb. As an adjective, street means something like: ‘typical of or demonstrating the life and style of fashionable young people living in big cities’, with implications of being cool, edgy and in the forefront of urban style.
Origins
The adjectival use of street seems to go back at least to the early 2000s when it was used particularly to describe young urban black culture.
