In Italian, are noun genders ever altered for "ironic" (or other) meanings?

Question

There may be other examples (and if so, please cite them), but one in particular comes to mind.

In Italian, the word for husband is "marito," and the word for wife is "moglie."

My understanding is that "marito" literally means "married man." So in theory, there should be an equivalent for "marita," a married woman, but that does not appear to be the case.

So does "marito" have connotations of "head of household," or something similar. And if you had a "roles reversed" marriage where the woman was clearly the boss, would anyone call her (informally or slang) a "marita" for emphasis?

Similarly, does the word moglie carry connotations of femininity or subservience? Would anyone refer to the man in the above roles-reversed marriage as a "moglio" (a male "wife" if you will)?

I've tried "looking up" these variations in online dictionaries and come up with blanks, suggesting that they are "uncommon" variations, if indeed they are used at all.

Answer 1

The word marito comes from Latin maritus, which in turn is a derivation from mas, maris (that is, male). It cannot be used to denote a generic “married man”.

The word moglie comes from Latin mulier, that is, woman, whether married or not. In Latin the word uxor denoted a married woman. To complicate things, donna (Italian for woman) comes from Latin domina (she who rules or commands, especially in a household).

So, of course moglie carries a connotation of femininity, but not of subservience. One cannot say *​marita except perhaps for getting a comic effect. The adjective maritato (married) can be used both for males and females, but there is ammogliato for denoting a married man.

Answer 2

Humbly trying to give a more general answer, sometimes noun genders are altered for satyrical or emphatic purpose, but this happens very seldom and mainly in trivial or vulgar contexts. Satyrical or comic sketches that use such a trick sound often rather gross and sexist or homophobic.

Nevertheless, we have a lady singer here in Italy that used to refer to herself as a "cantantessa", tweaking the normal "cantante" ("singer" for both the genders) with the feminine ending "-essa" for stressing her gender identity. I'm not aware of other similar cases, though.

Even correct - but rarely used - gender variants ("sindaca" for "lady mayor"; "ministra" for "lady minister") sound rather unusual and often give start to public flames about how gender should be considered to be politically correct when speaking.