The word of the week is hate

Songs of Love and Hate is the title of Leonard Cohen 's third album . Although it does not contain a song with that title, it is a collection of songs that all revolve around the theme of love and disaffection even though, despite the fact that the choice to use the word hate was intended by Cohen, many critics have observed that here hatred never goes beyond the boundaries of a very civil bitterness except when it is thrown against itself. In any case the collection seems to be, twenty centuries later, a direct descendant of the famous Odi et amo of Catullus, striking poem, composed of a single couplet (and perhaps for this reason also remembered with pleasure by the students), for many inspiring the brevity of the poets hermetic.

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The verses are these: Odes et amo quare id faciam fortasse requiris / nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior. According to two well-known Italian scholars, the linguist Massimo Arcangeli and the biologist Edoardo Boncinelli, Catullo, with the characteristic intuition of the artists, would have anticipated by centuries the discoveries of the London neurobiology laboratory that showed how hatred is a close relative of its opposite because it is born in the same area of ​​the frontal cortex of the brain where love is also found. We do not know if he was inspired by Catullus m he even put his own Umberto Tozzi, author of one of the most listened to songs in the world, I love you, where the verse I love you and hate you uses. And on the other hand Alberto Testa wrote for Mina that Great, great, great one whose heart is 'I love you then I hate you then I love you' etc.

This is what physiology tells us but also art and, ultimately, the experience common to all humans. And the etymology of the word? It is certainly not a mystery but its root tells us something more about the profound meaning of this feeling. Hate comes from the Latin, from the verb odesse which means hate. The Indo-European root of the word that the philologists date back to vad or uad means to tighten, press and is found in the Sanskrit avadhit, that is to reject, to distance. Vad is also an expression of the ancient Persian and means to beat, to reply that it would have echoes even in the ancient Greek otheo, I push, move away, drive away, from which expressions as hostile and difficult. The hypothesis of this origin, which in truth is not the only one, therefore refers to repulsion, rejection, repugnance.

It is precisely that kind of hostility and rejection that is manifested not only in cases such as the threat to Liliana Segre, for which 600 mayors from all over Italy and every political party took to the field under the slogan hatred has no future (how could it have? The hatred is closed and unhappy by definition, so it has no vision, much less of the future) but also in all those that populate the language and the so-called conversations on social networks. Again Arcangeli and Boncinelli explain that the idea of ​​rejecting that is at the origin of the word hate brings to mind the walls (and wall is a word we dealt with), the boxing that was the medieval castrum. In its definition the two scholars see great similarities precisely with the most famous social network in the world, Facebook: relatively closed communities that form a plot that is at the same time global but provincial, familistic and self-referential, which can be a generator of factious behavior, of violent reactions and the infamous hate speech, the language of hatred. Every closed community is necessarily factious. This is demonstrated by the ultràs that poison the curves of the stadiums and whose favorite banners are those that manifest hatred for a team or for a community up to the extreme of that all Hatred, certainly appeared at the Olympic stadium of Rome but perhaps also in other installations around for Italy.

Fortunately, Facebook is not only this (just think of how many useful things have been done thanks to appeals on the social network and how many examples of reception in a more general sense have been made possible, even from one side of the world to the other, by virtue of the its extension) and after all even a search by two mathematicians of Vermont on language, the first to make use of big data by analyzing billions tweets, millions of books, movies and songs in ten different languages ​​has led to the conclusion that the most used words for communicating on any platform are actually happy words. Of course, it is necessary to make that switch which, according to our physiology and the discovery of that London laboratory, should not be difficult for us humans: to pass from hate to love. One of the protagonists of a 1995 French film that quickly became a cult seemed to know it, La haine, that is to say L'odo: "Hatred only leads to hatred, haven't you understood it yet?" Says his friend to Vincent Cassell , who promises to kill a policeman if Abdel, a boy stopped by policemen for checks and ended up in the hospital, will die.