Words that make us shift in our seats

Italian linguist and university lecturer Federico Faloppa sits down with Grace Fainelli, writer and co-founder of the platform NaCo – Narrazioni Contaminate, to discuss language militarisation and hate speech. Together they reflect on the weight and responsibility that words carry, and on language’s power to manufacture enemies, wage "just wars," and engineer "smart weapons." Words, they argue, are bombs armed with a double detonator charge.

Fainelli opens with the word “woke,” a term that flooded mainstream headlines in the summer of 2026. It plays a double role, she explains, amplifying certain perspectives while silencing the marginalised voices that have long fought to be heard in public debate.

Faloppa sees the same duality in the word “remigration.” The term first appeared in eighteenth-century historiography to describe voluntary, reverse emigration; today, the European far right has appropriated it as a rallying cry for mass deportation.

"Words are not just words," Fainelli stressed, "if they can decide people's lives."

For Faloppa, “security” has followed a similar trajectory. He traces it back to Zygmunt Bauman's distinction between "existential security", intended as basic well-being, and "relational security", namely the sacrosanct right to social and emotional connection. Yet the term, too, can be politicised, weaponised to stoke fear of whoever is different. "We must call on institutions," he said, "to talk about security in a smart, not ideological, way."

Fainelli’s last bomb-in-a-word was “maranza,” a slur used to describe boys of migrant background, to push them out of social life in Italian cities. “The equation black equals stranger,” she explains, “creates a deep sense of loneliness and alienation in children who, regardless of their skin colour or foreign surname, were born and raised in Italy. We should reclaim the word maranza with anger.”

What the two authors agree on, in the end, is that the core problem with word-bombs is that they only detonate for certain people. Civil society has spent years pushing these battles forward, only for political will to fall short of carrying them through.