My vote for the uttermost macabre U.S. state motto goes to Maryland. It comes from the original seal of the state dating to the early 1600s, which bears the words running across the horizontal banner below the two male figures, stating “FATTI MASCHII PAROLE FEMINE,” and we’re just gonna need a minute to process this.
These are Italian words, recorded by George Calvert, father of Cecil Calvert, the Roman Catholic English founder of Maryland as its “first Proprietor.” George took it up as his family motto in 1622 after the death of his beloved wife Anne. The phrase was a known Italian proverb in Italy. A 21st-century spokesperson at the US Italian Embassy in Washington DC claimed that Pope Clement VII had said it in the 1500s when he was returning to Italy after having been to France.
The phrase literally means “Masculine deeds, feminine words.” Many people, starting in the 1600s, thought this meant something along the lines of “men act, women talk” — ie, super duper misogynist. And if you do a quick online search, that’s all you get. However, more recent research has traced the contacts of George Calvert to an Italian scholar called John Florio, who wrote the first Italian/English dictionary, and argued that “Fatti Maschii Parole Femine” should be gender neutral, which ends emphasizing the concepts “deeds” and “words”, so that the translation should really be something like “strong deeds, gentle words.” Which still doesn’t make that much sense IMHO but is a heck of a lot less sexist.
The General Assembly of Maryland voted that gender-neutral translation to be official in 2017.
Sources: “How a ‘sexist’ quote from 16th-century pope became Maryland’s state motto,” _The Washington Post_, Ovetta Wiggins, Jan 1, 2016
