On my town’s local facebook group a guy posts: “I’ll give away this semi-new weed-whacker for free to whoever comes to pick it up.”

I say I’m interested, if it’s still available… the answer is “Sure! Come pick it up from my garage whenever you want, it’s open! In so-and-so road, up the path with cypresses, where the road ends.”

Ok, to some of you USicans who live in rural areas it might not sound so strange, but believe me, the notion of “don’t worry, pick this thing from my garage at your leisure, I’m not ever closing it” is super bizarre to my Italian-born mind. :-D

Addendum: some American friends remarked how, with their “Castle Doctrine”, they would never risk something like that because it’s a nice way to get shot. Happy to report that I got the weed-whacker and I didn’t get whacked (ha!): Switzerland is one of the countries with the most guns among private citizens… but it is also one of the safest countries in the world, with negligible numbers of gun-related deaths.

Bonus Swiss Oddity: the weed-whacker, in italian ‘decespugliatore’ (literally, bush-remover) actually has a name in Swiss-Italian (not present in Swiss-German or Romand aka Swiss-French): the “Zekiboy”.

I don’t know the etymology of the word, but nobody in Italy has ever heard of it… nor in the rest of Switzerland. Like several other swiss-italianisms, it is probably a corrupted form of some dialectal pronunciation of an early brand, or some strange nickname for the tool.

Anyway… it’s funny :)