In bocca al lupo

Italy was as excited as everyone else about Barack Obama winning the US presidential election, so excited they had a full-blown colonel read out the weather forecast at 7.00 in the morning.

It's odd how what must be a relatively common word can completely escape your attention, then keep cropping up.

Shortly before we left the UK, Alberto wished me "in bocca al lupo". Which befuddled me as I thought I had least mastered the common hellos and goodbyes of Italian at that point. It means "In the mouth of the the wolf", and is a charming Italian expression for good luck (in the same way that we have "break a leg"). The correct response is "Crepi" or, in full, "Crepi il lupo", I think meaning "kill him" or maybe "kill the wolf". It comes from when people would go out to hunt and were wished luck before leaving.

Then on reading further Graham Robb's Discovery of France, he talks about the time when following the French Revolution, the common people got to list their long-held grievances:

Hunting rights were the sorest point: to see a furry feast scampering across a field and to know that catching it might mean death by hanging was more than a hungry peasant could bear. If the local lord spent all his time in a city or was not very keen on hunting, the area might be overrun by deer, boars, hares, rabbits and pigeons. To many foreign travellers, the characteristic sound of the French Revolution was the constant crepitation of muskets in the countryside exterminating the animals that had once enjoyed aristocratic immunity.

So "crepitation" is today's special word.

Incidentally, Alberto also advised me of some other less well-known Italian sayings for good luck, though I'm not sure if he was fooling with me:

In culo alla balena (answer: sperando che non caghi!)
In the arse of the whale (I hope he doesn't take a shit)

In groppa al riccio (answer: con le mutande di ghisa!)
On the back of a hedgehog (With iron trousers)