Language ideally capable of combining sharpness and elegance
The language changes over time, but in the Bank of Italy the aspiration to a clear, rigorous writing and perhaps, if you can, endowed with a certain aesthetic quality has remained alive; to a writing, in short, ideally capable of combining sharpness and elegance (…).
Of course, today we do not simply rely on the individual inspiration of an economist-writer like Einaudi. Yet the linguistic tools we have equipped ourselves over the years would probably have liked Governor Einaudi, who perhaps would have contributed to our Vademecum for the preparation of institutional publications (and probably would have criticized the capital “g”, normally used as the initial of his institutional position : “Capital letters spoil the aesthetics of the page”, he wrote to Ernesto Rossi). Perhaps he would have appreciated the indications against the abuse of the terms of fashion, of worn-out metaphors, just as he, for example, had fought against war metaphors in economics. Here again Valeria Della Valle is of help, who dwells on expressions such as ‘offensive action’, ‘new front’, ‘dialectical weapon’, ‘struggle in progress’, which Einaudi considered to belong to a linguistic sphere, to a phraseology (I quote Einaudi) more specific to war discussions than to peaceful commercial ones. (…)
Anglicisms in the technical language of economics
We cannot know how he would have faced a linguistic question much discussed today, namely the growing presence of Anglicisms in the technical language of economics; if he would have adopted the scrupulous attitude of someone who makes it his duty to reject them en masse, or agreed with the most possible position …
In our publications, in our speeches, we pay attention to avoiding Anglicisms when they are useless and inelegant, when the use of the English word is the result of laziness and sloppiness rather than of real necessity; when the equivalent Italian word, perfectly adequate, makes the text clearer and more incisive. But we are not declaring a prejudicial war on Anglicisms [ecco anche qui una metafora bellica!] in the minting of new economic, banking and financial terms … New words, when they indicate new things, now arise everywhere at the same time. Not infrequently the use of a global word to designate a global thing (a product, a transaction) facilitates communication, even between individuals of a single nation, inevitably immersed in the international flow of information and ideas. Not infrequently the frantic search for the indigenous equivalent, the linguistic cast, or at least the morphological Italianization, can sound artificial and harm, rather than help, the clarity of communication.
We do not know, but (giving in a little to the common habit of falsely attributing our opinions on facts that they did not see to the great) we like to think that those who, like him, fed on the multilingual debate of educated Europe and were immune – which was then rare – from any intellectual provincialism, he would not have had an attitude too distant from this.