How to pronounce “mezz” in English

Maria: Mezzani, orecchiette, fusilli.

One is Eric Mezza.

Then there's Eric Mezza who is a junior in Harvard now, I think?

It's just a mezzanine.

It's just a mezzanine.

This is Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, an Italian priest and cardinal who was born in 1774.

You can have it as a mezze with some pita bread to scoop up all the oily goodness.

We have Camille Brault, mezzo-soprano.

This Sunday we'll be playing at a jazz club called Mezzrow in the West Village.

So I would say she's either a lyric mezzo or a dramatic coloratura.

Anyone? Cardinal Mezzofanti this Italian cardinal of the 18th 19th century, who was so to speak 72 languages, which is a number that

But I heard the version of the anecdote about Cardinal Mezzofanti, this priest.

Oh what, Mezzofanti? Well, the story that you told?

All right. So Cardinal Mezzofanti is a hyperpolyglot.

Interestingly, Mezzofanti had a similar experience with written Chinese.

And that always goes with either the dramatic coloratura or a lyric mezzo.

Yeah. They have these repertoire that are-- Mezzofanti had something like 11 language families in seven scripts,

I think also because there might have been a move to try to canonize Mezzofanti, and the first step in the canonization process in the Roman Catholic Church is to make sure

I've had conversations with people saying, "Did Mezzofanti speak 72 languages like a native speaker?" The implication being that if he didn't like a native speaker, then it's not a phenomenon

whole store was 500 feet and then above it was this little mezzanine that was like 250 feet and we started getting in

Here's another etching, its a mezzotint actually and this was an astronomical occurrence of

Because my good friend Dolora Zajick, who has been one of the world's famous dramatic mezzos for years and years, trained at the San Francisco

If you go to an Asian center market where all this wonderful stuff, or Middle Eastern mezze,

There's a fascinating guy-- I talk about him briefly in "The 4-Hour Chef"-- named Cardinal Mezzofanti.

I went, "My God, it's Mezzofanti's flashcards!" So the common notion of the polyglot or the

He always claimed that he could speak Chinese, but Mezzofanti had a nervous breakdown when he was faced with trying to learn how to read and write Chinese.

And I'd say, "I'm writing about this guy Mezzofanti who spoke 72 languages." And people'd go, "Wow, that's amazing.

And then you have to have a healthy mix of things that are a bit more approachable, like one-pan dishes, like mezze dishes,

But there is one thing, though, that-- if you want to eat mezze, you're not going to go to your mom or to your grandmother or your aunt or whoever.

So my cooking, I tried modernizing a little bit in one of my books, "Modern Mezze." But I didn't modernize that much.

So I remember that we have the dining room was the piano of my mother, and then in a kind of mezzanine

And I was like, well, people understand small plates because of tapas, which is funny, because mezze predates tapas by, like, 2,000 years.

I always go to Mandy and say, do you see that guy, fourth row mezzanine on the left?

Yeah. We actually have on Sunday, we have in concert in Mezzrow.

I was just recommending Benjamin Cooper, which is a lovely little hidden gem on a mid-level mezzanine in a hotel right off Union Square.

This salad that you're having, the carrot salad, it's a nice little kind of mezze.

Even things that seem even obviously real, like nice firm objects, which at the Mezzo scale of physics, have nice reality to them,

So this is what they found, or an artist's rendering of what they found when they opened up Mezzofanti's tomb.

But in the book, I really endeavored to try to go meet living hyperpolyglots because the Krebs is really interesting, and the Mezzofanti character is really interesting.

There's a funny moment when I'm in Italy and I'm meeting with another guy that's an Italian historian who's written a book about Mezzofanti as a librarian.