# Neapolitan: Amm’ ’a scassà i ciessi



## orca

Ciao members,

Does anyone speak Napolitan?...
I'm translating *La paranza dei bambini*, by Roberto Saviano to Hebrew and this phrase appears a couple of times and is even a name of a whole chapter. The English translation leaves this title untranslated as a chapters' name, but on another occasion translates it like this: 
– Denti’, – disse Maraja, – piazza Principe Umberto come
la vedi?
– Come la vedo, Maraja? Amm’ ’a scassà i ciessi!


“What do I think about it, Maraja? Amm’ ’a scassà i ciessi! We need to bust everyone else’s chops.”

[Saviano, Roberto. The Piranhas (Kindle Locations 4519-4520). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.] 

The context is a young gang in Naples, the boss distributes the drug markets in town to his men.

I would like to get the exact meaning of the phrase, what every word mean, or if it's a set-phrase.

Grazie!


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## Sardokan1.0

I'm not expert of Neapolitan, but literally it sounds like :

amm'a - let's go to
scassà - break, smash
i ciessi - the WC

_"ciessi" _is the same of the Italian _"cessi"_, plural of _"cesso"_, vulgar word for "WC"


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## orca

Thanks. Now is there any street-meaning that can be related to drugs? Does the word Cessi can mean drugs? Like "shit" in English, say? The English translation, "bust chops" is a slang for "sell drugs", from what I saw in the dictionary. So is it correct? Or does the boy say something like, "let's go break some balls"?


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## Sardokan1.0

Perhaps they were literally going to vandalize the toilets in some public area. 

But I'm not sure, I've never read the book. Let's wait some Neapolitan for the correct answer.


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## Mary49

amm'a = we must


orca said:


> Or does the boy say something like, "let's go break some balls"?


This is the right meaning for me; the expression is repeated in the book without reference to WCs...
La paranza dei bambini


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## Sardokan1.0

It seems that you are right.


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## orca

If you care to elaborate on the subject, your examples now actually confuse me. I forgot about them, and now I see that this expression has more than one meaning. In these examples, it's something positive (the first one) and then in the other one - I can't begin to think how to translate it. Can you?


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