Straps and bottoms.

On Wednesday I called in at the cobbler’s in Roccafluvione to have the clasp on a strap inside my carry-on suitcase re-attached: the stitching had torn loose. Before I went I needed to look up the Italian for ‘strap’. To my surprise this is what I found: on bag or case (the word I needed) ‘cinghia’, on watch ‘cinturino’, on handbag ‘tracolla’, on bus ‘maniglia a pendaglio’, on bra ‘bretella’ or ‘spallina’. Yet in English, which has a richer vocabulary than any other language we just have the one  word, ‘strap’. Now I know cultural need determines vocabulary - the Inuit it is claimed, apocryphically, have twenty different words for snow. But what possible cultural difference could drive the Italians to discriminate lexically between different types of strap? Perhaps Italian lovers need to reassure themselves that their mistresses are clear which strap they are about to undo: la sua bretella not the tracolla on her handbag. Other Italian coinages are easier to understand. Recently, I came across ‘consuocero’ in the Corriere della sera. It means your child’s father-in-law. Only the Italians with their emphasis on la famiglia would dream up such a word. But yet they have the same word for grandchild and nephew/niece - as L.P. Hartley might have said: “Italy is a foreign country. They do things differently there’.

    As is also the case with medicaments. This morning I woke up to find a tick buried in my leg. How it got there God only knows. The dogs pick them up frequently from the woods, but they’re not allowed in the bedroom, so how the devil one had managed to crawl up my trouser leg I have no idea. Because we have deer in the woods, ticks can be dangerous to humans - they can transmit lyme disease from deer to man. I therefore went to the chemist’s to get an antibiotic. When I got home I discovered to my horror that the packet I’d carried home contained a syringe - you had to inject the stuff. I went back to the chemist - a not unattractive blonde in her thirties - and rolling up my sleeve asked if she’d mind doing the injection as in England only doctors and drug-addicts use needles. ‘Certainly,’ she replied, at the same time  indicating that I should take down my trousers. Oh the embarrassment. If I were as uneducated as the Oxbridge graduates who write columns in the Guardian, I would say that I’d made an arse of myself. Being very old I remember the expression ‘You silly ass’, my headmaster was much given to using it. But because the Americans spell and pronounce ‘arse’ as ‘ass’ younger people think they are simply anglicizing an American pronunciation and spelling. In doing so they really are making a donkey of themselves.