Bookcity at MEET | L’Antidoto, Vera Gheno

On Thursday, November 16 at 6 p.m., on the occasion of the new edition of BookCity Milano, we present Vera Geno’s The Antidote: an easy-to-read, easy-to-follow book for everyone that aims to become our new Prêt-à-Porter social grammar.

Envy, incompetence, impulsiveness, narcissism, boredom. No, this is not a list of deadly sins 2.0, but a sampling of the “poisons of the Net” that Vera Gheno’s sharp pen dwells on in this useful handbook. This time, the sociolinguist puts the expertise of words at the service of a topic very dear to her heart, online life and the harboring of malaise and discomfort that too often accompanies it. From the polarization of debate to the dehumanization of characters perceived as public, from the manipulation of narrative to the inability to select the content that is appropriate to share from that which should remain private, from the flattening on a plastic language to the resort to rhetorical fallacies, the author reviews a wide range of behaviors we engage in daily on social media and reconstructs the scale of relational and communicative dysfunctions that poison our lives, offering an illuminating reading of them and proposing useful solutions to defuse their disastrous effects.

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Vera Gheno, sociolinguist, translator from Hungarian and popularizer, collaborated with the Accademia della Crusca for 20 years, taught as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Florence for 18 years and has been a Type A researcher at the same institution since September 2021. Her first monograph is from 2016: A Practical Guide to Written Italian (Without Becoming Grammarnazi); from 2017 is Social-linguistics. Italian and Italians of Social Networks (both for Franco Cesati Editore). In 2018 she coauthored Keep it on. Post, comment, share without turning off your brain (Longanesi). In 2019 she gave to the presses Power to Words. Why to use them better (Einaudi) and in 2020 the ebook for Longanesi Words Against Fear. Snapshots from isolation. In 2023 she edited Words of Another Kind. How women writers changed the world (BUR). She works mainly on technically mediated communication, gender issues, diversity, equity and inclusion.

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The presentation – in Italian – will feature author Vera Gheno and speaker Beatrice Cristalli, school publishing consultant, trainer and linguist.