Post, parcel and account

Fifth on this list is imbucare, and the whole of it sits in la buca, the hole. A letter is not sent in Italian, it is put into the opening: passo a imbucare la lettera, ho imbucato tutto ieri sera, and the slot in the wall is la buca delle lettere. « To post » names the service instead, so the picture of the narrow gap is nowhere in the English word. That much is only a difference of image. What makes imbucare worth a paragraph is its pronominal form, which has walked out of the post office altogether. Imbucarsi is to slip in through a gap where one has no business being: si è imbucato alla festa says that somebody turned up without an invitation, and un imbucato is the person who did it. English has a verb for exactly this, « to gatecrash », but it is built on a gate being forced, which is loud and visible; the Italian one is quiet, and says that the guest went in the way a letter goes in, through an opening made for something smaller.