re: #257 iceweasel

Where’d the tragedy lesson take place?

re: #254 Fat Bastard Vegetarian

How does one incorrectly use tragedy?

From the “Calendar” thread last night:

OK, since it’s late and I’m in a curmudgeonly mood, I’m going to flog a dead horse.

People really ought to stop misusing the word and concept of “tragedy”.

If a wall falls on your great-grandmother, it is an accident, not a tragedy. It may be catastrophic for her and disastrous for her family (if she didn’t leave a will), but a tragedy it is not.

If a dingo runs off with your baby, it is not a tragedy. It is your own damn fault for putting the baby where the dingo could reach it.

If a bomb goes off on a bus and kills 37 innocent people, it is not a tragedy. It is a crime, an act of terror, or both. Probably both.

9/11 was not a tragedy.

Hiroshima was not a tragedy.

The Holocaust was not a tragedy.

To be a tragedy, the person or people affected (killed, usually, but sometimes left alive to suffer indefinitely) have to have a tragic flaw that makes their suffering or death inevitable. Fated. Tragic.

To call it a tragedy in the case of the great-grandmother would mean she had a flaw that made her walk under unstable walls.

In that of the baby, the baby or the mother would have to be flawed in some way that made the dingo ineluctable.

The bomb on the bus can only be a tragedy if all the people on the bus were flawed for getting on the bus.

Same for 9/11.

Hiroshima - well, actually, I guess you could argue the point.

The Holocaust as tragedy presupposes that the Jews are somehow to blame, which is close to blasphemy.

Those misusing the word tragedy will henceforth be downdinged. As a matter of principle.