infamita

See also: infamità

English

Etymology

From Italian infamità.

Noun

infamita (countable and uncountable, plural infamitas)

1. A most heinous act against one's own family, or against family life in general.
   • 1968, Mario Puzo, The Godfather‎^[1], page 386:

     I don’t want any [drugs] near schools, I don’t want any of it sold to children. That is an infamita.

   • 1977, Luigi Giorgio Barzini, O America, When You and I Were Young, Harper & Row, →ISBN, page 244:

     And why, if he had betrayed his own, did he not turn to his enemies for protection, as all traitors do? I imagined he must have committed one of those unforgivable Sicilian crimes, an infamità so serious that everybody must condemn him, his family, his allies as well as his enemies; one of those mysterious violations of the unwritten code to punish which rivalries, feuds, and gang wars were temporarily suspended; […]

   • 1984, Mario Puzo, The Sicilian‎^[2], Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 236:

     Don Croce sells information to the government and to me that is an infamita.

   • 2002, Jane Kathleen Curry, John Guare: A Research and Production Sourcebook‎^[3], Greenwood Publishing, →ISBN, pages 34–5:

     Philip teaches the children the Sicilian concept of omerta or silence and warns them not to commit infamita, or the telling of family secrets.