I bet you'll be familiar with what this word describes, even if you've never heard it before. There's no exact equivalent in English, but you can probably see why it exists in Italian: the abbiocco ...

or 'By any chance...'. As you can see, mica does an awful lot of work: it changes the tone of a phrase in a way that would require a whole bunch of words in English. Do you have an Italian word you'd ...