The «Zingarelli 2024», a thousand shades of meaning – Corriere.it

A little more, a little less, a little earlier, a little later. When Ruggero Bauli, now 90, told a reporter from Verona the secret of Pandoros, who had made his fortune in his youth after fleeing Princess Mafalda’s shipwreck, he didn’t want to evade. It wasn’t a matter of ingredients: flour, eggs, sugar… available for everyone. Like colors, words, musical notes… Putting them together: that’s art. And kiss the painters, the poets, the musicians. matter of detail. nuances.

My thoughts go light and ready / from my breast writes Lorenzo de’ Medici in his famous ballad. It is the same Gabriele d’Annunzio borrows this incipit, say Cristina Montagnani and Pierandrea De Lorenzo (How D’Annunzio worked, Carocci) to confirm the idea of ​​writing like this, at once, driven by his inspiring muse, everything is clear, everything is smooth, everything is in his head, but in reality he writes on loose sheets of paper and then on his desk he has other papers, always groups of loose sheets, on which he tries and tries a phrase, unravels a stanza or a jammed rhyme, studies a phrase and a stanza. Papers, then, very troubled, suffered, botched, which the poet throws in the wastepaper basket as soon as he arrives at a satisfactory draft. Come on, so there won’t be a trace of doubt…

And if it was like that for the father, imagine the others. The manuscript of the Infinity From Giacomo Leopardi It is kept in the National Library of Naples and already shows some retouching in a few lines. In the first and most famous lines (Semper caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,/ e questo siepe, che da tanto parte/ del far horizon il guardo Excludes…) the last horizon replaces the heavenly limit and towards the end infinity in the Infinity revisited. Small but key fixes destined to be studied for decades. Around forty years later, the publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis is losing patience with the awkwardness of Charles Baudelaire: My dear Baudelaire, we have been reading again for two months The bad flowers and we only printed five pages of it. The author, Anais Ginori, will relate that it took four months to re-read, is a precision maniac, a perfectionist who corrects himself to the bitter end. The 1857 drafts are a battlefield. Margins, deletions, additions, doubts, intuitions, notes for editors and printers. Baudelaire controls everything, not only his verses but also the graphics, the layout, the size of the characters….

The publishers of de Research From Marcel Proust and maybe even more thanUlysses From James Joyce. A few pages of notebooks seen online today says it all: a nightmare. To the point that before 56 corrections and corrections of previous corrections piled up in red, black or blue on two small pages, it is clear that the great Irish writer was sometimes forced to pause because there was not the tiniest vacant space to insert one syllable and you wonder how this book was printed. Suffice it to say that the amateurs hired by the author to transcribe these notebooks made infinite errors. By 1986, news broke that the person responsible for a new edition of the masterpiece, Richard Ellmann, had declared that it would have taken Joyce seven years to write itUlysses, it had taken another 44 to track down all transmission errors: over five thousand. Which made the already difficult work here and there incomprehensible. Question: If they had a computer that allowed them to endlessly correct and recorrect every word, would some literary geniuses ever end their wanderings in search of the perfect text with the exact word in the exact place? hmm…

a curiosity that teases. Even more so today that it will come out on May 2nd it is Zingarelli 2024. New edition of Nicola Zingarelli’s historical dictionary edited by Zanichelli, which promises in the paper version (2,688 pages, 145,000 entries, over 380,000 meanings including about 1000 new words and phrases or new meanings, over 5,500 words of basic Italian …) and even more so in the digital, a supply of words, synonyms and variables of all kinds that can (perhaps) satisfy even those insatiable perfectionists we spoke of.

Starting with the new additions (like the color scheme terms just mentioned by Elly Schlein or complexity mentioned by our bureaucracy) and starting with the space given for them a thousand shades. Example? Lush – rich – lavish – opulent. Abundant is what is in abundance, plentiful. Rich also indicates an abundance of something, but above all expresses a large availability of money. The car is plentiful and at the same time magnificent, lush. Opulent is that which is very plentiful and so rich, plentiful that it borders on waste or superfluity.

The goal? To help young people rediscover vocabulary, who today use an increasingly poor and elementary language, especially when exchanging SMS and WhatsApp, as well as teachers who do not always understand how to use the dictionary in their work and in their relationship with Students can be very useful, he explains the lexicologist Mario Cannella who has been taking care of it for forty years Zingarelli and with Blessed Lazzarini and Andrea Zaninello he took care of that too. In short, we need to go beyond the use of “open and close” for once. If you need to get rid of the doubt about the spelling of a word, just go to Google. But if you want to understand this word, you have to go to the dictionary.

But which dictionary? The more open one, he replied Gabriel Garca Mrquez, who worked in his Mexico City studio surrounded by dozens of different vocabularies from different fields and different languages ​​to draw here and there everything he needed to tell his stories, overflowing with seemingly spontaneous fantasies thrown in one fell swoop were: For me, the The best phrase is not the purest, but the liveliest. That means the most impure. He, a Colombian, wrote in the Corriere in 1981, loved the Mexican, the most imaginative, expressive, flexible perhaps because it is the emergency language of a nation that has forgotten the old national idioms and at the same time learned badly what it brings Hern Corts. The synthesis sometimes reaches magical dimensions.

How fundamental this revival of vocabulary is (according to Jean Cocteau, every literary masterpiece in extreme synthesis is a dictionary in disarray) and how indispensable it is for the future of our country, he recalled three years ago in Without words. Small dictionary to save our languageII Linguist Massimo Arcangeli He explained that among hundreds of candidates for a degree, the use of the lemma diligent (carrying out his duties with diligence, diligence, attention to the Zingarelli) was absurd: A diligent prayer, My brother made a diligent oath, Diligent, they take me early in the morning. Not to mention apodictic (obviously, irrefutably): Out of 176 freshmen tested in 2019, 175 could not provide a synonym. Imagine the nuances.

Sin. Not just because, as Stendhalne explains The Charterhouse of Parma The narration of how Fabrizio Clelia sees love captures nuances invisible to an indifferent eye and draws infinite conclusions. But also because in a country like ours, so divided between friend and foe, obsessed with insurmountable intrigues, resentment and hatred, the loss of nuance is more serious every day. And her recovery would even have an ethical dimension.

The project. Entries signed by Armani and Del Piero

The vocabulary of the Italian language
Zingarelli 2024
, edited by Zanichelli, will be published on Tuesday. Contains 145,000 entries, over 380,000 meanings including a thousand new words and meanings that tell the present, more than 5,500 words of basic Italian. A special emphasis is placed on nuances of meaning, that is, words that express similar concepts, but each used in a specific meaning or in a different context. While synonymy favors affinities, nuances (three examples in the adjacent infographic) underscore the differences between the words that make Italian richer.

The volume (2,688 pages, 78 euros, which is also available in digital format) also contains 136 definitions signed by authors who have distinguished themselves in their respective fields (eg identity by Elena Ferrante style by Giorgio Armani ten by Alessandro Del Piero). The dictionary’s release was preceded by a contest aimed at students in their last three years of high school, who were challenged to write a seven-track essay. An outline proposed by Corriere proposed a reflection on books and knowledge, starting from a text by Claudio Magris. The competition, created by Zanichelli and Scuola Holden, awards Holden a scholarship and three special mentions (a participation on Radio Deejay, a report on SkyTg24, the publication of the text in la Lettura).