The Secret Histories of 'Catastrophe', 'Debacle', and More

'Tragedy' didn't always mean 'disaster.' Neither did 'disaster.' That's the tagline from this article by Merrian-Webster that looks at the history and etymology of some words that are all too common in the news right now. For example: tragedy.

Definition: a medieval narrative poem or tale, typically describing the downfall of a great man

Some portions of the changes in the meaning of tragedy are rather easy to understand; the word’s initial sense was concerned with a narrative poem (such as Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde). Since such poems often had endings that were other than happy it is not difficult to see how the word might come to mean “a very bad event.” Less obvious is the etymology of the word, which is thought to be a combination of the Greek word for “he-goat” and a root denoting “singing” (a possible explanation for this is that the tragedies of Ancient Greece were influenced by the Peloponnesian satyr plays, in which the satyrs in question had a goatlike form).