EATING PEAS WITH A KNIFE.

EATING PEAS WITH A KNIFE. Using a knife to eat peas seems difficult to me, but I have seen it done once, and it illustrates the kind of class distinction that Virginia Woolf was applying to poets. Thirty years ago (!), Mary Jane and I took our longest vacation and, as part of it, spent 11 days in Venice. We ate almost all our meals outdoors at the same cafe, which featured pasta and pizza. One day, a large young man with very pink cheeks and uncombed blond hair sat down at the same long table we were eating at. Mary Jane whispered to me: “There’s a real ‘cavon'”, using the Neapolitan pronunciation of “cafone”, which is defined here as: “It was originally a neutral Italian word meaning a poor peasant. However, in Italian it evolved to mean an uncouth, boorish, ill-mannered person….” Just as I was looking up—puzzled because I did not know the word—the young man used his knife to eat his peas.