The Italian term “ecomostro” is often used to indicate:
an ugly and environmentally damaging building. (Collins)
Here is an example:
(Linkiesta.it)
Is there a term, a neologism for “ecomostro”. In dictionaries I could find only descriptive translations.
NB: the supposed duplicate is related at most. This question is not about an ugly building!!!!!
There is a touching belief among students of English that there is an English word for every possible "thing" or circumstance. Some students limit this to being an English word for every possible "thing" or circumstance in their own language.
Unfortunately, this is not so and many foreign words have to be rendered as a descriptive phrase, or even clause, in English.
“ecomostro”
an ugly and environmentally damaging building. (Collins)
combines an ecological disaster or threat and an eyesore.
There is no single English word.
There are many subtleties to translation involving word nuances and social and historical context and the social context. And neologisms in the original have their own difficulties. For the Italian word 'ecomostre', it seems to come from a portmanteau of the term 'ecological monstrosity' to describe a building that is large and ugly and also impacts surrounding natural situation badly.
To preserve the implications but not necessarily all the nuances of the Italian term, I suggest the best translation is:
ecological monstrosity
Just be as literal as possible. There's no equivalent single word in English.
Comments: Just as Italian created the neologism, there's nothing stopping English from doing similarly, either by borrowing the word directly. Unfortunately 'ecomostrosity' would be unnatural in English, we'd really need to modify and add the 'n' back in to match the English 'monster' to make it a palatable English word.
But also, 'ecomonstrosity', while it could very well be a good English neologism (as suggested by TaliesinMerlin), it has already been used (though not enough to be included in dictionaries) and it means something different from the Italian. 'Ecomonstrosity' seems to be used by a small handful of authors to devote 'results of ecological disaster'.
Which is to say, if some journalist or TV pundit in English starts referring to brutalist architecture or dams that disrupt ecosystems as 'ecomonstrosities' then maybe that meaning will take off in English.
Which is to say if you really want a new word to become popular, get a New York Times op-ed article published with your word in the title.
One term you can use is monstrosity. It keeps to the cognate within ecomostro (mostro ~ monster) while fitting usage in English. From the Oxford English Dictionary, def. 4:
- Something aesthetically displeasing, esp. an ugly, oversized, or inappropriate building or structure.
1856 Illustr. London News 11 Oct. 359/1 Trafalgar-square, that place of monstrosities and hideosities,..is a spot which it is scarcely possible for an educated Englishman to pass without a feeling of shame or disgust.
...
1991 M. Gray First Fifty (BNC) 109 Why a laird would build such a strange, suburban, concrete monstrosity in a remote and beautiful glen is open to debate.
This recent headline captures the sense that a structure is both aesthetically and ecologically undesirable:
'A monstrosity': A Fayetteville neighborhood frustrated by natural gas substation (WRAL News)
So do the first lines of the article, also using the similar word eyesore:
An eyesore. A monstrosity. That’s how frustrated homeowners in Fayetteville describe a natural gas substation built near their homes.
The word is 'ecomostro'. Do what English has always done, just appropriate the word, for example, 'pergola'.
Ecological eyesore is a good option and it is given as the English equivalent of ecomostro in Wiktionary also. It is easy to understand as it combines ecological and eyesore, a well-known word for an ugly building. The term ecological eyesore is not that common but it has enough credible results from a google search (which includes Washingtonpost and Forbes articles) to consider it. The term even appears in some Italian sources and here is an example:
All these efforts contributed to the demolition of the ecological eyesore by the Swiss authorities, which concluded in 2012.
As a neologism, ecomonster could be the right choice as mostro means monster in Italian; and English has many words with the prefix eco-, usually hyphenated as in eco-disaster. However, per google search, ecomonster was not used for this meaning in many occassions and it shows up as a proper noun in many results. Thus, this term is not that ideal. As a bonus, I'm tempted to coin ecosore from ecological eyesore.
The English phrase that immediately comes to mind for me is "eco monstrosity", though you might omit "eco" depending on the context.
The impulse to seek "one word" as a translation for a single word in their own language is common for second language learners. While this is a good motivation to expand vocabulary, it is ultimately futile, as the aggregation of morphemes into words differs widely between languages, and may vary even between speakers of the same language.
Languages range from agglutinative, where many adjectives and pre/postpositions simply become part of one noun "word", to those with complex inflexion systems that encode many pre/postpositions but leave adjectives as separate words, to those that have no inflexion whatsoever and mark all relationships using pre/postpositions, or infer them from word order.
Beyond that, asking for "one word" does not even make sense in some languages, though that is rare today: prior to the creation of their written forms, many oral languages did not have an universal sense of "a word" as a unit that would retain "the same" meaning when severed from a sentence. Western linguists have largely imposed such notions on the speakers of other languages.
As other answers have indicated, there is no single word in English which matches precisely to the Italian ecomostro. However, for the limited case of single-family private homes, the term McMansion (which has been in use since the 1980's) comes close.
A McMansion may not be technically ugly or an eyesore, but it is often considered vulgar:
McMansions often haphazardly mix a variety of conflicting architectural styles and elements, combining quoins, steeply sloped roofs, multiple roof lines, complicated massing, and pronounced dormers, to produce an appearance that many consider unpleasant, jumbled, or messy.
While they may not be ecological disasters individually, collectively they represent both wasted resources and the increasing economic division that promotes such waste:
The widespread disdain for the McMansion stems from perceptions that these houses ...are extremely wasteful (due to their inefficient land usage (suburban sprawl) and the large amounts of materials and utilities needed to construct them), and increase commute times significantly.
