The Thursday! Newsletter 1-39: Taking Back Catastrophe
Volume 1, Issue 39
I had this weird thought the other night.
Okay, I guess I should be a little more specific because, as I'm sure you know (or have figured out by now), I have a number of weird thoughts each day and that number is usually in the double figures. This particular weird thought, however, got me thinking more about how the words and phrases we use shape how we think about our world. Here's where I started:
Since "catastrophic failure" is a thing, could there also be such a thing as "catastrophic success"?
This took me down the etymology rabbit hole because I wasn't at all sure how we got the word "catastrophe". Today, we think of a catastrophe as the ruinous conclusion to a series of smaller failures that snowball into an immense disaster. Something goes wrong, then something else goes wrong, then a slightly bigger wrong thing happens because of the others and pretty soon you have a catastrophe on your hands.
That's not how the word started out, though. Back in the 1500's, folks took two Greek words and smashed them together. The first was "kata-", which means "down", "through', or "against". It's the same word that shows up in "catapult" (to throw against) and "catalogue" (to collect down). The second was "strephein", which means to turn or twist. We see this word in others such as "apostrophe" (a mark used to replace words turned away) and the virus we know as "strep" (simply, twisted). Put them together and you get a sudden turn against what was expected.
Folks usually applied the word to the last part of a dramatic story -- the sudden turn to a conclusion. Often, that conclusion was tragic, but it didn't have to be. Any sudden turn of events or fortune such as a poor man coming into a fortune or a mighty city suddenly falling to the enemy was considered catastrophic. Because most dramatic sudden turns bent toward the tragic, though, people started using the word almost exclusively to mean a bad outcome. That change, by the way, started taking hold in the mid-1700s. Today, we thing of a catastrophe as entirely negative.
But...what if we pulled that word back a little bit? What if, instead of imagining a the sudden inevitable slide toward disaster, we think of a sudden inevitable slide in the other direction. That is, what if we leave room in our thoughts for catastrophic success?
But let me go just a little farther down that line of thought. We hear the phrase "systemic failure" quite a lot but when was the last time you heard someone talk about "systemic success"? A system can build wins as well as losses, can't it? We don't need to blame failures on an unthinking, undiscerning system and credit the successes to brave and excellent individuals, right? We can build a system for success just as easily as we can allow one to churn out failure upon failure.
I guess my question here is: why can't we take the words we use to describe failure and apply them as often to success? Your creative work might fail catastrophically, sure. But mightn't it also succeed catastrophically? Might it not, after months or years of steady but slow progress suddenly turn upwards and soar? We speak of someone having a "meteoric rise" expecting them to burn out quickly. A meteoric rise almost never leads to a long and successful career. Most often, it ends in, well, a catastrophe.
I just don't think that has to hold. I want to take back "catastrophe" to where it was before the mid-1700s. We're allowed to do that, you know. If you've paid attention lately, you've probably seen all sorts of people trying to change perfectly good words into perfectly crapulent words. If they can hijack words for their purposes, so can we. At least our purposes are uplifting and useful, right? We can take a word and suddenly turn it back to the great thing it was.
Catastrophic success. Doesn't that sound good to say? I know it feels weird, but that's fine. Use it enough and it'll feel perfectly normal. Catastrophic success.
Then perhaps we can go make some of that particular type of success and when people ask us what happened, we can use our newly-turned phrase. Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't that be something to see in headlines instead of failure and disaster and woe?
Yeah. I'm digging that already. What do you say?
FUTURE NOTE: I need to take a bit of a break in the very near future. Thursday! has gotten to the point where I need to catalogue (ha! see?) the topics about which I've written every week since November so I don't repeat them, or at least so I don't cover them again in the same way I did before. Also, I need just a little creative break from writing the essay. I'm not sure when the break will happen, but I'll let you know. Instead of the essay, I'll drop in something kind of neat that I'd like to share -- a video or a link or a quote or some such. The rest of the newsletter will be as it is now. Cool? Cool.
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What I Wrote and Read Last Week
"The Tree of Keys" is a sweet story with a large serpent and a man with an ancient and tough job.
Joshua is starting to wonder what sort of place The Lighthouse is in "Steps Against the Darkness".
Sammit, the Mother Sage of her village, has her hands full with her daughter and a message from long-dead dragons in "Reading the Light of the Ghost Dragons".
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One Last Thing
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