The last word of the year? It’s a “word”
Verbatim, logomachy, epidemic chatter are dominant in our lives compared to things actually done, for better or for worse. Battista Falconi's italics
If we had to choose a word of the year, we will choose word. In the sense that verbiage, logomachy, epidemic chatter are dominant in our lives compared to things actually done, for better or for worse.
The same "femicide", chosen by Treccani, is part of this dynamic: it is a neologism, now dated, which renames a pre-existing type of crime in order to pay greater attention to it. What also happened, especially after the assassination of Giulia Cecchettin , due to the concomitance of many and not entirely clear conditions, among which the victim's sister suggests there is "normality" in which the crime occurred between two so-called "good men" Boys". And undoubtedly also thanks to the greater sensitivity to gender issues, which Libero mocked by titling a page to Giorgia Meloni "man of the year". A choice that produced further surreal developments: Giorgio Mulè heard himself called " madam president " by a parliamentarian who thus wanted to retort to her colleague guilty of having called Elly Schlein "secretary" of the Democratic Party. Issues that it is an understatement to define as hackneyed and stale, that have dragged on wearily for a very long time but are unable to die definitively.
It's like this, words continue to survive, they feed on themselves, on themselves (we are also confirming this as we write these lines), producing more and more of them. In the illusion that it is enough to raise the tone, the emphasis, the superlative to be able to make people listen to our ideas for at least an instant. In recent days we have witnessed an exchange of accusations relating to the war in the Middle East conducted with "genocide" and "Hitler". On the other hand, Israel officially accused of genocide by South Africa is truly a nemesis that we would never have imagined.
Returning to "President Meloni", two mirror comments in recent days focused – from Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Luca Ricolfi respectively – on the very aggressive way in which the leader supports her own theses and counters those of her adversaries and the inability of the oppositions to get away from the prejudicial attempts to demolish and denigrate any government initiative. They're probably both right. But in both senses these are very often empty words, which are rarely followed by facts.
And it certainly doesn't just happen in politics. How many words did we spend when a boy killed a child while he was driving during a "challenge", an endurance race behind the wheel filmed and posted live on social media. Not for an act of mere, criminal exhibitionism as an end in itself, it was a professional YouTuber who apparently earns (or earned) a lot of money in this way. Yet, after the general indignation, we are now moving towards a plea bargain of 4 years of sentence which could be served under house arrest and social services, without even a day in prison. However, much less is said about this, because the chatter is sinusoidal, fluctuating, inconstant.
This is confirmed, again in the field of justice, by the so-called "snail trials" which drag on, like the one for the Camorra mentioned in recent days, which lasted more than 20 years without reaching a final sentence. And at the same time we continue to discuss the "telematic turning point" which could give a minimal acceleration to this scandal, without however actually changing direction. Indeed, according to some experts the judicial backlog, at least civil, would now be definitively unsolvable.
Words go out of fashion. For example, those on migration have accompanied us for most of the year and are now very little covered by the media, despite the fact that the landings continue. The Minister of the Interior, like the Prime Minister, admits that on this front the government has failed to achieve the desired objectives, taking comfort in having avoided "the invasion". And then, what media are we talking about? Do "mass media" still exist, at a time when newspaper sales are collapsing and Mediaset is announcing an overtaking of Rai, but has it occurred at a time when both competitors are subject to an exodus of viewers towards different platforms?
Communication "packages" are now chaotic, personalized, anarchic, uncontrollable. The writer Maurizio Maggiani is right when he asks to stop with the drip of forwarded greetings with which our phones are flooded in this period. An appeal that goes hand in hand with the suggestion of Massimiliano Parente who, declaring his depression and the risk of worsening on holidays, says that the only way to overcome it on New Year's Eve is to spend it as a normal day, which it is. Maybe staying silent.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/lultima-parola-dellanno-e-parola/ on Sun, 31 Dec 2023 10:47:45 +0000.