Che palle!
“Che palle!” literally means “What balls!”
The expression “Che palle!” is one of the most vital and most used in the Italian language. Since it is important that you get this right, we are even going to give pronunciation pointers: “Kay PAWL-lay!”
It means, literally, “What balls!” These are balls, testicles, that are figuratively dragging on the ground from eccessive boredom or irritation. The slightly dated slang phrase “What a drag” is in fact a good approximation – if without character – and since it does not really mean anything in itself may be a linguistic gift to the American Republic from successive waves of Italian immigrants.
At any rate, it is the expression that Italian teenagers mumble under their breath when they are required to take out the garbage, what the young man says to his tiresome fiancée the nth time she reminds him that he is not to wear a striped tie with a striped shirt; it expresses the inexpressible irritation of the office rat who loses a day’s work when Windows decides to show him or her a blue screen rather than the new spreadsheet.
It is further, beyond that and perhaps above all, an expression of profound and total boredom.
“Upper Italy” decided you needed to know about this useful figure of speech when we read – (here) – how cosmologists now estimate that in approximately three trillion years there will be no way to know we are not living in a totally static universe. Put somewhat differently, those external phenomena that could show us that the Universe is doing much of anything at all will have moved so far away from our own galaxy that there will be no way to know they are there.
Though this might not seem to be the kind of thing we need to much worry about, it may be a problem for future scientists. Physicists Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer from Vanderbilt University point out in an upcoming paper in the “Journal of Relativity and Gravitation” that, if the information that currently allows us to understand how the Universe expands disappears over the visible horizon, “physicists of the future will be able to infer that their… universe has not been eternal, (but) it is unlikely they will be able to infer that the beginning involved a Big Bang.”
We might consider leaving a note, but most likely no-one will want to bother; for the very future inhabitants of our planet, “what remains will be ‘an island universe’ made from the Milky Way and its nearby galactic Local Group neighbors in an overwhelmingly dark void.”
Che palle!