Language 18th October

How funny!

Winter's approaching and clothes become an important matter in my everyday experience abroad.

Yes, you enter a shop, you look for a good new sweater that makes you walk normally without shaking at any step (here in the Netherlands) and you acknowledge the black holes in your vocabulary…words you don’t know, you didn’t care about in your whole foreign language learner experience….

What is the name for those small woolly balls that make your clothes seem like a carpet? In Italian they are called “pelucchi”, a word I though was a regionalism. I googled "pelucchi" but it seems that online dictionaries don’t bother them. At least, Zingarelli doesn’t mention them. So why should I? Because I needed one of those woolly balls remover! All dark clothes are dotted in white and it looks like I suffer from dandruff!!

Finally, combing through websites of clothes and winter collections, I found out the LINTS!

The result of this search is that the English for TOGLI PELUCCHI is LINT REMOVER or/and LINT ROLLER depending on the different shapes it takes and how it works. Actually, it can be either a sticky roller which takes the lints away from your clothes, or it can have a rough surface (like velvet) filled with very little brushes. Moving the brushes in the opposite direction of the clothes fabrics, you remove the lints entrapping them within the brushes.