confetti

Confetti is the Italian plural of confetto, a small sugar-coated candy or sweetmeat — the same root gives English 'confection.' The word derives from Latin confectum, past participle of conficere ('to prepare, to make up'), from con- ('together') + facere ('to make'). The candies — sugar-coated almonds, anise seeds, or small cakes — were thrown during carnival celebrations in Renaissance Italy as tokens of festivity and (sometimes) mild aggression.

The tradition of throwing objects during carnival and wedding celebrations is ancient. Roman wedding ceremonies involved throwing nuts and grain; medieval carnivals featured the throwing of eggs, flour, and other foodstuffs at varying levels of violence. The Italian confetti represented a civilizing of this tradition — sweets were expensive, and throwing them was both generous and festive. The wealthy could demonstrate their abundance by literally scattering it into crowds.

As the industrial nineteenth century made paper cheap and candy expensive, carnival celebrations began using paper discs as substitutes. The paper imitation was called confetti in Italian because it resembled the candy — small, colorful, scattered in celebration. English borrowed the word in this paper form. The original candy has been almost entirely forgotten; the word describes only the paper simulacrum.

The trajectory is characteristic of carnival culture: real things are replaced by representations of themselves, and the representation becomes the tradition. Real food replaced by paper food; the gesture of abundance replaced by the symbol of abundance. The confetti at a modern wedding has no nutritional value whatsoever, which is perhaps the point. Celebration has been abstracted into colored paper. The word remains, carrying the ghost of the candy inside it.