Hacker News Reader

Comment by catalogia | Hacker News Reader

That seems like an anachronistic meaning of the word tragedy. In the context of dramatic productions, a tragedy does indeed imply a flaw or weakness in character leading to some unpleasant outcome. But I don't think that implication is generally present when using the word in other contexts. I doubt many if any modern Europeans or Americans would find fault with the statement, "It's a tragedy when women die during child birth." Where the implication of a personal flaw present in that statement, it would be a deeply offensive statement. But in practice I think that's an agreeable statement.

It could be the case that Americans have a bias towards seeing calamity instead of tragedy (that rings true in my opinion), but I don't think that bias is evidenced in you or other modern English speakers treating the two words as synonyms.

View on HN

Tragedy is avoidable, while calamity isn't.

There's a difference between saying someone is responsible and the victim is responsible.

The Cargo Cult decries the principle of legitimate responsibility, and consistently attempts to deny the guilt of the true architects of tragedy in numerous ways - victim-blaming being a very popular one.

In this example, a significant number of Americans would rather an adult woman die in childbirth than terminate a dangerous pregnancy.

If adult women - who may well be married and have a family - actually do die because legal abortion is unavailable, those Americans become responsible for avoidable deaths.

But the magic of the Cult's moral inversion means they continue to consider their position a wholly good one.

"Good intentions suffice."

This is not the same as - for example - a climate denialist buying beachfront property in Southern Florida and then being amazed when it floods in a storm and becomes impossible to sell.

"Consequences are things that happen to others."

These look opposed, but the MO is the same in both examples. Legitimate responsibility is denied, and replaced by a simplistic self-affirming moralising certainty which is actively hostile to mature empirical rationality and empathy.

To be clear, I wasn't trying to make a political point about womens' healthcare. I think most people would say such a death was a 'tragedy' even if state of the art medical care had been provided. Somebody dying young is generally considered tragic in the modern casual sense of the term, particularly if it was through no fault of the victim.

In retrospect I should have chosen a less sensitive example, so I'll do that now: In the common modern sense somebody being killed by a falling tree branch is more tragic than a drunk driver fatally striking the same tree. But in the more traditional sense of the word tragedy, that's flipped backwards.

Yes, the comment struck me immediately as off because in typical conversation involving real people, tragedy usually implies the person is blameless.

Now that I think of it though, even in this other use implying a flaw, you are supposed to relate to and sympathize with the flawed character. In this view it seems harsh and inhuman to complain that every calamity might be seen as tragic. A mature person can often sympathize with human suffering even if the sufferer did something "bad" to get there. We shouldn't be 100% in punishment mode or gloating at comeuppance. Forgiveness is a thing. Sympathy for imperfect people is also a thing.

English seems to be losing nuance quickly, as we smash words into synonymity through ignorance or, relatedly, allowing figurative, sarcastic, or hyperbolic uses to overtake and replace original meanings. I know languages and word meanings change, but my sense is that this is happening very fast, and largely in the direction of creating redundant perfect synonyms than adding new meanings or nuance to replace what's been lost. I don't really see new vitality of this sort coming into English to replace what's leaving.

If this effect is real and not something I'm imagining, my best guess is that it's a result of much wider exposure to language (consider: how many fewer words, spoken and written, did the average person in 1850 hear or read in an average day, than you do?) with the bulk of it coming from writers and speakers far less well-educated, on average, than the people who had access to, say, publishing in the 19th century or perhaps early radio, and so more likely to mis-use words or phrases. Mistakes have always become common usage if they live long enough, but if the rate of mistakes become very high and the ability of those mistakes to gain a wide audience grow, that must surely have some effect on language, and any notion that it must necessarily be neutral or even beneficial strikes me as wishful thinking—I believe it's at least possible that changes of this sort would harm the practical expressive potential of language (as when we here judge that this useful word's distinct meaning is dead, to no purpose, and without ready replacement).

> English seems to be losing nuance quickly, as we smash words into synonymity through ignorance

Languages lose complexity all the time. Ask Italy, Spain, Portugal, France why they don't have a full Latin case system with various suffices to distinguish them. It's not because their ancestors suddenly became stupid. It's just that languages change and a very common outcome is that complexities get lost in time. I can tell you with certainty that this has been happening in Indo-European languages for thousands of years and yet civilization has thrived in the same period.

You're overthinking it in a very judgemental way.

I think I’m allowed to judge loss of expressiveness with no apparent benefit as bad. It’s fine to judge things.

You are perfectly welcome to get stressed out over completely natural processes that happen repeatably in the course of human history, but I would just like you to be aware of this aspect before thinking it improper. Happy new year.

I just don’t think that such things are bound to always be fine, is all. I’m aware of the evolution of language and not upset that folks don’t like it when I put a circumflex in “rôle” these days. I would like to know where new expressive vocabulary is coming in to replace what we’re losing—I don’t see it. Yes slang and such, as always, but those are mostly more close or exact synonyms for existing words and aren’t entering Standard Written English at the same rate we’re losing words, as far as I can tell.

> I doubt many if any modern Europeans or Americans would find fault with the statement, "It's a tragedy when women die during child birth." Where the implication of a personal flaw present in that statement, it would be a deeply offensive statement.

This strikes me as a perfect illustration of the article's point. The US spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world, yet our maternal mortality rate in 2010 was higher than "nearly all European countries, as well as Canada and several countries in Asia and the Middle East" [1]. As of this year, the rate was more than double what it was in 1987 even as it declines in the rest of the world [2]. Black women's maternal mortality rate is three to four times that of white women [3].

In spite of which it would be "deeply offensive" to insinuate blame here, or that there may be structural and cultural causes that we refuse to see or fix. "Tragedy is a synonym for calamity", indeed.

[1] https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/deadly-delivery-the-mater...

[2] https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/maternal-mortali...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2017/12/07/568948782/black-mothers-keep-...

Please do not twist my words. I hope it should have been clear that when I said insinuating blame would be offensive, I meant that insinuating the woman died as a consequence of some moral failing on her part would be deeply offensive. I chose that as my example because I thought it universally agreeable, because I hoped to avoid political responses. Obviously in retrospect, my example was poorly chosen.

See also, my clarification 6 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911068

Sorry, didn’t mean to twist your words; I misinterpreted what you meant by that example.

I agree, and will surely keep using the anodyne sense of "tragedy" in my day-to-day chit-chat about calamities. Your "bias toward seeing calamity instead of tragedy" phrasing might be a better way to put it, because it contrasts the two words without suggesting widespread misuse.

It wouldn't have to be widespread misuse. It's not impossible that the author meant it in the way the grandparent comment wrote it, even while understanding that's not how most use it. They show an interest in using language more adventurously throughout the piece.

> I doubt many if any modern Europeans or Americans would find fault with the statement, "It's a tragedy when women die during child birth."

They would not find fault with the statement because, particularly in the USA, they will indeed consider it a tragedy and that there must be someone to blame.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com