“See you next week?” “Even no,” one would reply, thus making use of a second expression that has become widely accepted in recent years, perhaps decades now, but which sounds decidedly less unpleasant than the first. Yet, “next week” without the article, which took off in the Lombardy area, it is now a sort of pandemic virus – it seems devoid of communicative justifications – as Maurizio Assalto writes in his weekly column (“My Linguaccia”) on Linkiesta.it. There is no doubt that the colleague has reasons to sell, because from the point of view of the functioning of Italian, it is a linguistic monster – often used with a certain ostentation on social media or on posters by certain political monsters, but this is a ‘ another story.
How it was born, and why, is not known. Of course, English may have influenced (which says “next week” or “last week”, without an article when it comes to the complement of time, but for example the article puts it all right in contexts such as “the plans for the coming week” ), just as happened to “support” instead of our “support”; the verb was originally, as the Treccani vocabulary explains, akin, if anything, to the Italian “to bear” and was used in technical language to indicate something that acts as a support (“bearings that supported a transmission shaft”, for example).
But anyhow, now even writers use it, perhaps when they thank those who have / have supported or supported them for an award. “Next week”, we can bet, will sooner or later have the same consecration, even if at the moment it has not resounded in the surroundings of the Strega, perhaps because it is a very Roman event.
Meanwhile, just like viruses, it is in some way modifying the environment, in short, the linguistic and cultural ecosystem. Mind you, the language changes and evolves continuously, it belongs to the community of speakers and it is never a question of good or bad. But of meanings yes: because compared to the usual expression with the article, this neologism seems to give a sort of acceleration to our experience of the world.
Next week will be when its time comes; next week is almost now, our present is less and less important. In French it goes better: not only is there “la semaine prochaine” but also, slowing down a little more, “la semaine qui vient”, which generates a climate of just waiting, almost the sensation of a slow if inexorable walk: when it will come, this blessed next week, it will be its time.
And we await it with the awareness of our present and our near future. All in all it seems more civilized, and indeed it suggests the real antidote, the decisive vaccine even if it takes a long time to inoculate: read Proust.
It must be said that the Piedmontese, in their dialect, have always used the same expression “slow”, and are even a little fond of it. Yes, they are described as people who do not like movement very much, but it is notoriously a historical linguistic misunderstanding. “What a hurry, but where are you running, where are you going,” has been singing Bennato for a long time. All right, these are the words of the cat and the fox, and you have to be careful; but this too is another story.