'Respect' is the word of 2024 for the Treccani

Respect' is the word of the year in 2024 for the Treccani. It was chosen by the Institute of the Italian Encyclopaedia "for its extreme topicality and social relevance" as part of the #leparolevalgono communication campaign, aimed at promoting a correct and conscious use of the language. The Treccani Italian Dictionary defines respect as a 'feeling and attitude of esteem, attention, respect towards a person, an institution, a culture, which can be expressed with actions or words'.
"This word," explain Valeria Della Valle and Giuseppe Patota, co-directors of the Treccani Vocabulary, "should be placed at the centre of every pedagogical project, right from early childhood, and then spread to relations between people, in the family and at work, in relations with civil and religious institutions, with politics and the opinions of others, and in international relations. The term respect, a continuation of the Latin respectus, should today be re-evaluated and used in all its nuances, precisely because lack of respect is at the root of the violence exercised daily against women, minorities, institutions, nature and the animal world". "More than a word to define 2024, I hope it is a wish for 2025," Ilaria Gaspari, a writer with a background in philosophy who came to attention with her novel 'La reputazione' (Guanda), tells Ansa. "We live in times of violence, of war. Actually, according to many schools of thought, aggression is an unmediated response to emotions of anger, rage. But actually being systematically cruel to other forms of life stems from the fact that you do not take into account the existence of the other in its entirety, as a subject. If you recognise the other as subordinate to you or as the object of your actions, you can afford anything. Respect, on the other hand, means seeing the other person as a subject like you,' the writer says. 'It was a valuable choice that of the Treccani because we are in a time when we tend to dehumanise other people out of antagonism, out of aggression, and certainly realising the importance of respecting oneself is very important,' adds Gaspari, a Milanese who lives in Rome and is the author of narrative essays such as Lezioni di felicità (Einaudi) and Vita segreta delle emozioni (Einaudi).
'It is very significant,' Della Valle and Patota add, 'that the expressions in the Italian language that contain this voice are very numerous: from having respect for someone, someone or something to mancare di rispetto, from di tutto rispetto to col rispetto dovuto, and so on to the formula 'with all respect', unfortunately often used improperly in political polemics as a premise for aggressive, offensive and violent verbal attacks, or the expression men of respect, sadly known for referring to mafia affiliates. Gaspari, too, invites us to reflect on the fact that we often use the noun in a somewhat empty way: "we say 'with all due respect' and then take the respect away".
"The latest OECD report, which says we no longer know how to read, made an impression on me because this inability to read does not only concern books, but the whole relationship with otherness. Empathy, i.e. the ability to feel what another person is feeling, is spoken of too often and inappropriately. This word was invented not by a psychologist, but by an art historian in the 19th century, Vischer, who analysed what happens when observing portraits. Reading the world through art, through literature, greatly enhances this ability to feel with others that does not leave us confined in our fears or within the sad passions that prevent us from seeing that we are not alone, even in our anger and envy,' he concludes.