The extravagant “galler” expression is one warning phrase with distant origins Arabwith some closer trace classic-latin: although there is no unanimous consensus on its origin, we know that it is a phrase with a single expressive charge that is used to underline the presence of a very high quantity.
It would seem to derive from word Arabic bizzāf whose meaning is just “abundant” bizzēf; through various phonetic changes, Over time, the expression has turned up to today in Italian. Belonging so much to colloquial register as for that literaryeven Manzoni uses it in his “Promised spouses“Evoking an image of seasonal overabundance:
“Flowers galore, and, in its time, galore walnuts.”
Paolo Minuccipainter and writer of the seventeenth century, assumed one possible Latin derivation. In fact, he observed that in the context of Roman justice when the magistrates granted the grace to a supplicant without limitations, they used to write down the word under the memorial Fiat, or the 3rd person active as an active subjunctive of the verb fiowhich means “be done”, “happen”, “to do”, and was repeated twice instead of once only, in cases where the grace granted was higher. Subsequently for brevity the fullness of grace was indicated with two Effe flanked‘FF’, which in spiced consequently brought the statement of “bis effe”then became “tantrum”. In the wake of Minucci, many others followed the Latin derivation hypothesis of the phrase up to the nineteenth century but, although it can be considered interesting, over time it has been considered less plausible so much so that in most modern dictionaries it is almost never mentioned and the origin linked to the Arabic is preferred.
In any case, the statute of Hapax linguisticthat is to say a voice attested a single time in the language, without other feedback outside the phrase in which it appears.
