Marco Cimarosti scripsit:

> BTW, although "tuttifrutti" is built with Italian elements, it is not
> properly an Italian word: we borrowed it from American English only after
> Elvis's famous song ("Tutti-frutti... Honnolulu...").

"Honolulu"??

He's saying "all rooty", a distorted form of "all right" to force
the rhyme. The l's aren't realized, as is often the case.

The author of the song, BTW, is Richard Penniman, *far* better known as
Little Richard, and I'd say his version is better remembered now than
Elvis's, at least in the U.S. He first wrote "Tutti-frutti, loose booty"
and used this wording in live performance, but had to tone it down to
get past the recording censorship of the day (1955).

> Much later (60's or
> 70's, probably), when the first Italian tourists started travelling in the
> USA, people discovered that it had something to do with ice-creams, so all
> ice-cream kiosk all over Italy started selling "tuttifrutti" ices, "as they
> do in America".

As far as I can determine, the word was first applied to chewing gum, rather
than ice cream. Thomas Adams of Brooklyn (the name sounds rather Anglo, but
I bet he had Italian neighbors) first sold it some time between 1869 and 1888,
when it became the first gum sold in vending machines in New York City.

I have also discovered (although there is only one source on Google for this)
that the French for "tutti frutti ice cream" is "glace de Plombi�res"!

--
John Cowan jcowan@... www.ccil.org/~cowan www.reutershealth.com
"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarves."
--Murray Gell-Mann