Margine is a very rich and articulated word, we will then see how and how much, but it is one of those - we have already encountered it: crisis, for example - which suffers the most common meaning, the prevailing one, which ends up making it lose its richness and various meanings. that despite everything still resonate inside her.
So much so that even in one of the idioms that we use the most (journalists do it above all), a certain ambiguity immediately arises, indeed it seems that the word does a good somersault.
We often hear or read that someone has said or done something on the sidelines of a meeting, a convention, a summit, an event.
What does that mean?
It is clearly a way of indicating that the central event was another but, on the sidelines of this, out of this, sideways, or sooner or later, something else also happened.
The world of journalism has been and is full of service managers or editor-in-chiefs who send a colleague to cover, as they say, an event by telling him: 'We don't care about the conference, just take the' on the sidelines'.
The reason is that the apparent center of the question is actually not very interesting but the statements that can be derived from this or that character, on the sidelines, are much more so.
Those chief editors, even if most likely they do not know it, are illegitimate children of a philosopher, Jacques Derrida, of whom we will return to talk soon.
And basically the bitter irony of Renato Zero, who in the song 'L'altra sponda',
marginality sings, perhaps he wants to refer to the same thing.
[] In recent weeks, especially in the last few days, in the grueling stop and go of the negotiations between Russians and Ukrainians, we have heard of a crack (which coincidentally refers to the root of the word spirit, which we have dealt with, because it refers to breathing , at the vital breath) but very often also on the edge.
In general, to refer to the possibility of a solution: there is a margin of negotiation, that is, however small, there is the possibility that things will go in a different way than the dramatic one in which they seem to be going.
But there is also the margin for ambiguity and the margin for error, which can cause serious damage, but also the margin for maneuver.
The idea is that we are talking about small but extremely precious spaces that can start the conquest of different and much larger spaces.
Not to mention the operating margin, a profitability indicator that instead defines a portion, roughly the difference between revenues and costs, but which can also be very large and give to a company, and its partners and / or shareholders, an extraordinary wealth.
So much so that if we look in any dictionary for words that indicate the opposite of margin, the first thing that is indicated to us is center or heart but immediately afterwards there are expressions such as loss, expense or deficit.
Margine is a word belonging to a group belonging to an Indo-European root, merg-, which has the meaning of border, an equally rich word which we have already dealt with in which the idea of limit prevails.
And the Persian Marzban, commander protectors of the borders of the Sasanian empire, seem very similar to our own marquises, to the Germanic margraves, lords of the marches, that is, a nobility with frontier responsibility and power.
From the High Germanic marka, which would seem to derive from marg- with the meaning of crawling and drawing lines, derives the brand and the mark.
This edge, however, as we have already seen and understood, is not just the end of a surface but a space which, while not occupying the center of the story and indeed for this very reason, can lead us to somewhere else, open up passages.
But it does so only because it is no longer the thing it was up to a certain point: the edge of a fabric frays and therefore changes, the margins of a page are white, beyond the text.
Stay away from the heart of a thing and stay on a border, a brand,
they are very different things, underline the 'warriors of words' of A word a day.
And then we dedicate the conclusion, a little longer than usual, to what, if it didn't sound a little irreverent, we could define 'the king of the margin', as in some places it is said that I am 'the king of carbonara' or 'the king of supplì' (because they make them better and enhance them).
Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher who passed away in 2004, was a guy who titled the books Passions, Spurs and precisely Margins.
He was born in 1930 in El-Biar, on the edge of Algiers, we could say, of a Jewish family.
After various scholastic vicissitudes, due both to the fact of being Jewish and to a certain propensity for indiscipline, he moved to Paris at the age of 19 and entered, on his third attempt, the Ecolenormal superieure.
Margini, considered one of his fundamental texts,
in which the concept of 'difference' is elaborated, has the entire first chapter, just to be immediately clear, with the margins not white but occupied by another text taken from a book, Biffures, an untranslatable term with which one of the four volumes of the Rule of the Game, a work by Michel Leiris, a surrealist who became an ethnologist and above all a 'disruptor of language'.
For Derrida the margin is both a suspension, an undefined place, and the space from which one can lean out and see or re-see the history of thought in a different way.
'The mystery - we read in the text of Leiris alongside that of Derrida -.
.
.
it can be represented as a margin, a fringe that surrounds the object with a halo, isolating it at the very moment in which it highlights its presence '.
In short, something that is anything but marginal.