From the sound of it, one would think that a bellicose neighboring state like New York, Pennsylvania or perhaps even the diminutive Delaware were about to take up arms and drive their tanks across the border in an attempt to invade the Mid-Atlantic state.
In fact, what readers or viewers often come across in the Italian media are sentences like: tir sfonda il new jersey sulla 336 or camion sfonda i new jersey e perde carburante sul raccordo.
So why does this foreign-sounding word crop up in Italian? In English, this is simply known as a ‘jersey barrier’ or ‘jersey wall’ (technically, the New Jersey median barrier, because it originated in New Jersey in the 1950s), but the key word was and still is ‘barrier’.
Italian – and other Romance languages – tend to preserve the first word in compound nouns borrowed from English. Therefore it makes sense that ‘New Jersey’ has stuck, but ‘barrier’ is often omitted.
There are plenty of examples including ‘smoking’ for ‘smoking jacket’ (e.g., ha comprato uno smoking per il gala), ‘night’ for ‘night club’ (Roma pullulava di night durante la Dolce Vita), ‘British’ instead of ‘British Council’ (e.g., vado al British) and so on and so forth.