Thanks to pop culture’s portrayal of Italian-Americans and the popularity of organised crime movies set in NYC and NJ, few words are as synonymous with the New York and New Jersey dialects as Fuhgeddaboudit.
It is among nearly 200 new words that were included in the September update to the Oxford English Dictionary. Other standouts were: butt-fuck, Yoda-like, clickbait, Oompa Loompa and ‘Merica.
The dictionary defines Fuhgeddaboudit as:
In representations of regional speech (associated especially with New York and New Jersey): ‘forget about it’, used to indicate that a suggested scenario is unlikely or undesirable.
But as Depp’s character in Donnie Brasco explained, “sometimes it just means ‘forget about it.”