Don’t smile, now you can say it

Slutty attitude, becoming spinster (male or female)...

Don’t smile, now you can say it

The greek philosopher Heraclitus, who lived before the year zero, realized that everything flows, everything is in flux. He formulated the famous maxim, “You can’t step twice into the same river”. It was an amazing intuition since, by comparing the life of the fifth century BC and the life of the twenty–first century AD, the first would be steeped by rallenty effect. There’s nothing that can be static. Not even the language. It represents a communication system in which manifests the language, the set of cognitive processes common to all peoples. Language is a social product, the result of conventions of which word is the concrete linguistic execution that differs from country to country and even within it, as there are linguistic diversity: the dialects (vernacular languages). If the society is in constant evolution, the language reflects the inexorable flow too. There are extinct or death languages, have come to the terminus. They can be a subject of study, but no one talks using its words. However, to understand the etymology of a lemma, we go back to the old language in which every modern word has its roots.

Every year we wait it like a mystical event. This is the Zanichelli press release that announces the new Zingarelli edition with peculiar new words.

As society changes with dizzying pace, Zingarelli 2014 includes new words. Some of them make us smile, as “slutty attitude” and “becoming spinster (male and female)”, while others have the aura of a patent, as “hashtag” or “self publishing”. The vocabulary of the Italian language is enriched by neologisms, some acquired by Anglo–Saxon matrix. As in a quiz game we can have fun trying to guess the correct definition of “scrap dealer”: who propose to replace an executive team considered outdated. Enter the field also linguistic inventions such as “spread”, “feminicide”, “spending review”, “esodato (a worker without job and retirement)”. If you meet a person aged between 20 and 30 years old, he/she isn’t a young adult, but an “adultescent”. Because today’s society has made him/her a late teenager with precarious life and work conditions and with a perpetual student condition. Pathological gambling and compulsive is widespread? Let’s appeal to the “gambling addiction”. The human soul is always more prone to corruption and unscrupulous? We need an “ethicist”. Are you lost? Don’t panic, there’s the “geolocation”. Microsoft Word is underlining all the new words, will have to learn that can’t listen twice the same language. 

Source: “La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno”, an italian newspaper, Novembre 1, 2013, p. 24.