This is something I can really sympathize with since every time I hear an American say things like "for who" or "to who", forgetting that the proper word is WHOM, I feel slightly ill. I also object to "him and me" as opposed to "he and I", the use of "less" in place of "fewer", and the near total disregard of our poor, pitiful English subjunctive as in "I wish I was in Italy", which should, of course, be "I wish I WERE in Italy".

But Italian, like other European lingoes, has an additional problem: The intrusion of words from English, clearly the lingua franca of our age (once it was French, but that is no longer the case). And the fact is that words such as break, know-how, bodyguard, bar, film, garage, smoking, babysitter, spin, mouse, welfare, look, are all concepts that can be expressed in pure Italian without any foreign assistance.

In addition, some frequently used English-sounding words such as footing (jogging), box (a private, single-car garage), stage (a period of internship), and ticket (the percentage of a health-system service to be paid by the patient) either don't really exist in English or have an entirely different meaning.

Legislative proposals of this sort are not new but the latest has been signed by representatives of all the political groups in Parliament with the exception of the Northern League which favors increased use of the northern dialects used in what they call "Padania", the area of Northern Italy around the river Po. Others believe dialects can increase separatism whereas the use of standard Italian has repeatedly proved a factor of greater unification. They would like to see an article stating that Italian is the national language inserted into the 1948 Italian Constitution.

The exaggerqated use of English words - particularly odd in a country where very few people speak decent English - is part of a trend that affects all of Europe (and not only) because of the ongoing influence of the United States in technology as well as in TV, movies and music - in other words, in popular culture (on one recent Italian TV program, one person said to another "Dammi cinque", "give me five", and you know where THAT came from).

But Italians are also getting lazy about their grammar and increasingly one hears people forgetting to use the subjunctive, which is probably one of the most beautiful verb tenses in the Italian language. It's true that in good Italian one is called on to use the subjunctive - the tense which expresses doubt - far more often than in most other languages (my take on this, is that, historically, Italians have always preferred doubt because it implies less commitment). But it is indeed lovely and if things go on as they are now it may be that the only people to use it regularly will be we philo-Italian foreigners.