Cosa nostra originally meant our world as a metaphor, not a proper name

Evidence

It is clear from the context that—even in 1973, ten years after the press had adopted it as a proper name—the expression is being used metaphorically, to mean our world, tradition, values. According to Tommaso Buscetta, the mafioso officiating at the initiation rite says, “And now you know the secrets of this thing”: “thing,” transcribed in the files with a capital T, is rashly assumed to refer to an entity rather than simply to indicate a failure of vocabulary. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 357

Categorization

• XREF: Capital-T ‘Thing’ as misread metaphor parallels bureaucratic flat literalism elsewhere in institutional analysis (e.g., OED/prescriptivism debates).
• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘la cosa nostra’ as idiom meaning ‘our world/tradition’ rather than an organization’s real name.
• SEED: Article angle: the bureaucratic habit of capitalizing metaphors—how transcription conventions create entities that never existed.