Hi
Is a female magazine photographer a paparazzo or should the word end in -a? I couldn’t find the word ending in -a, so I presume it’s paparazzo. I look forward to your feedback.
The word is Italian for “pest” and is always masculine, so always ends in “o”. It has nothing to do with whether it is used to describe a male or female.
On a couple of lookups I think I may have the origin wrong; named after a Fillini character. Nonetheless, it would not change based on who it’s applied to.
Paparazzi - Wikipedia - Paparazzi (US: /ˌpɑːpəˈrɑːtsi/, UK: /ˌpæpəˈrætsi/; Italian: [papaˈrattsi]; singular: masculine paparazzo or feminine paparazza)
In Italian, for words that exist in parallel masculine and feminine versions, you’ll switch the ending accordingly. Any masculine agentive noun that ends in -tore has a corresponding feminine form ending in -trice.
Paparazzo is the sort that doesn’t have a gender-switched version, so the masculine form is invariable. Lots of nouns in Italian are like that; e.g., il Sindaco is the mayor even when she’s a woman. Take for example this sentence: Virginia Elena Raggi è una politica italiana, che ricopre la carica di sindaco di Roma. Virginia Elena Raggi is an Italian politician [feminine] who holds the office of Mayor [masculine] of Rome. Now some people including the Rome mayor’s office are starting to call her “la sindaca,” but that’s a neologism not found in any dictionary. There are currently debates going among Italian grammarians whether or not to coin new words like “la sindaca.” Too much to go into here.
Look how deftly the gender agreements are handled in this news headline: “Caso Marra, indagata Virginia Raggi Il sindaco di Roma convocato in Procura.” In the Marra case, the investigated [feminine] Virginia Raggi, the Mayor of Rome, is summoned [masculine] to the prosecutor’s office.
By the same token, if there is a word that exists only in a feminine version, a male holder of the office would still be called by the feminine word. They certainly do that a lot with titles, like Sua Eccellenza or Sua Maestà which are feminine, so much that “she” has become the polite word for “you.”
I see that only wikipedia says that “paparazza” is possible in the feminine form. Is Wikipedia wrong?
Paparazzi (US: /ˌpɑːpəˈrɑːtsi/, UK: /ˌpæpəˈrætsi/; Italian: [papaˈrattsi]; singular: masculine paparazzo or feminine paparazza) are independent photographers who take pictures of high-profile people, such as athletes, entertainers, politicians, and other celebrities, typically while subjects go about their usual life routines. Paparazzi tend to make a living by selling their photographs to media outlets focusing on tabloid journalism and sensationalism (such as gossip magazines).
I think paparazzo is just fine. An audience might shout “bravo” at the end of a performance but I don’t think anyone in English-speaking world will shout “brava” to a female performer.
There’s a pretty general equality trend in the English language (and foreign words borrowed into English) to depreciate ‘gendered’ terms for occupations to a non-gendered term.
Thus terms like waiter/waitress are being replaced by server, policeman/policewoman become officer, actor or comedian can be of either gender (actress/comedienne are declining), nobody refers to Betsy Price as the Mayoress of Fort Worth, TX, etc.
So using an originally male term for either gender is fine. (Most targets of their photos use a term like a**hole, which applies to both genders anyway.)
According to a lot of English language crosswords, “brava” for a female is the norm.
I don’t know about English, but in Italian you definitely say “brava” to a woman.
The OP has opened a can of vermicelli. Living languages are dynamic and changing all the time. It wasn’t until I looked up the Rome mayor’s office today that I learned there’s a neologism like “sindaca” or for that matter “paparazza.”
Paparazzo originated as a proper name: the name of a male character in Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita. The star Giulietta Masina claims she made up the name by making a portmanteau of pappataci ‘mosquitoes, pests’ with *ragazzo *‘boy’. On the other hand, the origin of paparazzo is claimed as Abruzzi dialect for ‘clam’ because of how the camera’s shutter opens and closes like a clam’s valve.
Note that there is no mention of “paparazza” in the Italian version of that Wikipedia article. It was added to the English article on August 16, 2010, but the editor who added it provided no citation for it. It could easily be challenged and removed, so don’t rely on it.
It seems to me that in English it’s much more commonly used as a plural, so it would be moot either way. And I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the plural used even when the singular would be appropriate.
There’s no compelling reason to ever assume that Wikipedia is right.
But gender in Italian is different than English. In Italian, as other romance languages, we refer to gender as masculine and feminine, but that is a matter of convention because Italian speakers do not literally think of a machine as a girl and a tomato as a boy. Gender of occupation words can match the person’s sex, but in the case of *paparazzo *you would just use that word, like we might say *shylock *for a loan shark, although as **Johanna **notes (I am so glad **Johanna **is here) there may be a trend towards a modern back-construction to a feminine form.
For all intents and purposes, paparazzi is a singular noun in English. Also a collective one. And the plural of paparazzi is paparazzis. Yes, there are a few people who use the Italian singular, but they’re a very small minority. Prescriptivists are going to complain, but they always do about these things. Their complaints virtually never change the way people talk.
So the answer to the OP is that a female photographer who annoys celebrities is a paparazzi.
That sort of thing happens when the borrower language fails to recognize the plural morphology of the loaner language. The collectives and broken plurals of Arabic are a great one for this in Persian and Urdu.
عالم ‘ālim - a scholar in Arabic.
علماء ‘ulamā’ - scholars in Arabic, a scholar in Persian.
تاجر tājir - a merchant in Arabic.
تُجّار tujjār - merchants in Arabic, a merchant in Persian.
شيعي Shī‘ī - an individual of the Shi‘ite sect in Arabic.
شيعة Shī‘ah - the sect collectively in Arabic, an individual in Urdu. (“Are you a Shī‘ah?”)
جني jinnī - a genie in Arabic.
جن jinn - genies collectively in Arabic, a single genie in Urdu.
Saying “a zucchini” in English happened much the same way. There really is no singular for zucchini in English. Especially because the singular for a small gourd in Italian is zucchina (a basic gourd being zucca, feminine), and its plural is zucchine. English got it all kinds of wrong. In fairness, I speculate it was a Sicilian feminine plural that made it into English, because both genders collapse to -i in the plural in Sicilian.
Although it’s odd that English speakers are so accepting of the Latin masculine second declension plural in -i that they stick it on words that don’t even conjugate that way (“octopi,” “penii”). The Italian plural ending in -i is the exact same thing directly descended from Latin, and yet somebody says “a paparazzo” in English and they get scolded prescriptively by descriptivists, 
dtilque. Go figure. Are people really not aware that Italian is the direct descendant of Latin and makes the same plurals?
And because English isn’t crazy enough, we’ve somehow managed the reverse of this and gotten in the habit of substituting the singular lasagna for the plural lasagne. An Italian would be so puzzled: “You’re baking just one lasagna?”
Possible technicality: I believe the term does not apply to “magazine photographers” but only to freelancers.
Give this man a biscotti!
It’s funny how it’s pretty common for Americans to be overly interested in trying to make Latin nouns properly singular or plural, to the point of making ridiculous mistakes like using “peni” for the plural of “penis”, but virtually never try to reconcile the proper plural in Italian, when Italian is essentially the same language and the rule has the same origin.
I think it is not related to the employment status of the photographer but rather the behavior of being annoyingly (or possibly criminally) intrusive on their subjects.
I’ve heard claim otherwise, and Wikipedia also seems to agree with this:
I think the two parts are related. The tabloids don’t want the liability of having their employees engaging in potentially criminal behavior. So they outsource that to freelancers.
I’m a photographer and I used to be involved in agencies who dealt with this type of photography. I don’t know if the term “paparazzi” is technically exclusive to independent contractors, but the nature of the business is certainly that paparazzi are “photo to the highest bidder” sort of people, so not tied to any one publication as a staffer. This is not to say that staffers are not sent on paparazzi type assignments. But, typically, we think of them as photography mercenaries in the industry, with no specific loyalty, unless that loyalty is rewarded.