At the risk of coming across as hopelessly eccentric, overly fastidious, archaic and pedantic, I feel the need to express my absolute dismay at Americans’ misuse of the words tragic and tragedy. The overuse and outright misuse of the terms grate on me like a piece of loosely held chalk streaking across a blackboard. America is my chosen home and I love this place, but this absolute bastardization of the English language is for me an illustration of one of this nation’s primary shortcomings, which is its failure to instill in its students a classical education…
Americans throw around the terms tragic and tragedy with absolute abandon, using them whenever something bad has happened. This is a misapplication of the words and the sense they are supposed to convey. If someone dies, according to Americans, it is a tragedy. If a plane crashes, according to Americans, it is a tragedy. If a train jumps its tracks, according to Americans, it is a tragedy. If a candidate they consider to be unqualified for office gets elected, according to Americans, the outcome of the election was tragic. If a group of people, or one person for that matter, are or is senselessly slaughtered by some unhinged individual, according to Americans, the event is tragic. If someone succumbs to natural causes, according to Americans, the death is a tragedy. If a company that offers a product that was widely in favor with the consuming public goes out of business, Americans call that a tragedy. In actuality, none of these as generically described are tragedies and three of them – the election of someone deemed unfit for office, the death by natural causes and the failure of a business – could never qualify in the strict sense of the word as a tragedy…
The concept of tragedy and the tragic was defined, if not invented, by Aristotle. In The Poetics, his work that defined expressive art as it was then known, Aristotle dwelt upon the dramatic arts, comedy and tragedy. Although he did not dismiss comedy as an art form, he made clear that he considered comedy – the depiction of life as it was then known with a light air that made fun of or found the humor in social conventions or created a narrative of social conventions being defied or ignored or broken such that mores were held up to ridicule – to be a lesser art form than the more serious dramatic presentation of tragedy. In Aristotle’s world view, comedy was frivolous and tragedy was important. Tragedy dealt with the human condition and moral issues in a way that was at once humbling and remindful of mankind’s perilous state, as well as instructive and in some stoic and even painful way, uplifting, an appeal for us humans to eschew our foibles and shortcomings and aspire to a more noble existence and to be careful and considerate about how we do just that…
Anyone, any mere mortal, could defy social convention, if he chose, said Aristotle, essentially. Any man could be an actor in his own personal comedy. But not just anyone could be the protagonist in a tragedy, according to Aristotle, and that is the point that is lost on most Americans…
In Aristotle’s classical definition, a tragedy comes about when a tragic hero inflicts upon himself an undesirable fate. In almost all cases, this undesirable fate was death. Tragedy requires a tragic hero. And a tragic hero is not just anybody. A tragic hero cannot, according to Aristotle, be a common man. A tragic hero is one who has risen above, or naturally exceeds, average status. In the tragic drama of antiquity, almost all of the heroes were of noble birth, that is, of high social rank. They are, to use a concept that is somewhat foreign to the American way of thought, better than everyone else in almost every way. Tragedy is not steeped in egalitarianism. Tragic heroes are rich. They are intelligent and skilled. They are handsome. They are energetic and active. In some cases they may be thinkers, but more than that, they are doers. They are enabled by their social status and the support of those around them. They are enviable. But as admirable and above average as tragic heroes are, they are still human. And like all humans, they are imperfect. They are in some way flawed. And it is that flaw, aside from mere chance and caprice, that is an essential element to their demise, although chance and caprice may play a role, too. Aristotle used the term “hamartia” to describe the hero’s fatal flaw. Each tragic hero is ignorant or unsuspecting of his own particular hamartia, or at least insufficiently aware of its implications. In a tragedy, according to Aristotle, events move together and in combination with the hero’s hamartia, and as a consequence he is laid low. He goes from being on top of the world to being defeated, utterly defeated, driven into what is truly “a tragic fate” from which there is no recovery. Usually, this means he is killed…
What tragedy illustrates, according to Aristotle, is that we are all mortal, that we are all vulnerable, that no matter our status or talent or consistent string of luck and fortune, we all have an imperfect understanding of the world, a blind spot, and our ignorance can lead to the loss of our status, of our good fortune, or life itself. What is further illustrated by tragedy – true tragedy – is that we can never be absolutely secure in our pride and overconfidence and that there are forces greater than ourselves which control our fate and that sometimes that hidden force of destruction lies within us…
In their misinterpretation of the terms tragedy and tragic, Americans seize upon the elements of mortality and fate that are inherent in the concept of tragedy and apply the words as if someone dying is all there is to it. But there needs to be more to what occurred than a death to make that event tragic. That is not to say that someone’s death could not be tragic. A death might be a tragedy, but then again, it might not be. Take for example, someone who contracted cancer and died. Well, if the deceased had been a scientist laboring with isotopes in his laboratory in a cutting-edge search for a formula for cold fusion that holds out the possibility of transforming mankind in a pursuit that only a scientist of his high caliber could pursue and while doing so he became so enthralled with his mission and so focused on making progress that he failed to take adequate precautions with the materials he was using and thereby exposed his tissues to some form of radiation which led to his sarcoma, then his death would be tragic. Conversely, if some fellow was too lazy to weed his garden and instead insisted on using a chemical herbicide to control the weeds that had cropped up among his vegetables and in addition to breathing the fine drops of mist from the herbicide as he sprayed it in the garden he later ate the radishes and celery and broccoli and string beans he grew in that toxin-laden soil and developed cancer as a result, his death from that cancer would not be tragic. In the first case, a high functioning man of science functioning at the highest order and striving toward a noble goal would have been undone by his own carelessness. His death would represent a tragic loss. In the second case, this was no personage of high function or nobility and that he met a sad fate because of his own stupidity would not rise to the level of tragedy. Similarly, a plane crash might be a tragic one, though most likely it would not be. Let us posit the existence of an aviator, let us say one who like Howard Hughes was independently wealthy and was devoted to using that wealth to explore the uncharted possibilities of manned flight, who was constantly pushing the envelope of his profession. If such a man or woman personally designed and then tested avionic devices intended to improve the performance of aircraft took to the air in one such plane outfitted with his or her newest invention and that device failed, sending his or her plane plummeting to the ground and taking his or her life, that would be tragic. When a passenger or a bunch of passengers get on a plane and the plane crashes, their deaths are not tragic. First off, a tragedy is specific to one individual whose death comes about because of his hamartia, his excessive pride and his inability to see his own shortcoming. Tragic death is not collective death as typified in the bad luck of some people who get into a flying machine that for no reason related to their own action or choices fails. In the Aristotelian sense, a tragic hero is a single individual who stands above others, a person of exemplary quality “whose misfortune is brought about by some error or frailty of his own doing…”
Americans have grown sloppy in their use of the language. They have conflated the concept of tragedy into that of death. For them, the term tragedy is interchangeable with the term fatality. Those are two significantly different things. Tragedy is a noun. Tragic is a modifier, an adjective. Both are woefully overused. Easily, in 90 percent or more of the cases where the term tragic is used it is being misapplied. Better adjectives in these cases would be “heartbreaking” or “sad” or “deplorable” or “terrible” or “mournful” or “heart-rending” or “poignant” or “painful” or “shocking” or “lamentable” or “grim” or “grievous” or “woeful” or “sorrowful…”
Part of the problem arises, of course, from the emotion-laden circumstances surrounding death and the loss people feel at such times, which are not conducive to lecturing people on etymology or the classic definitions of words or to be criticizing their word choices. When one hears the words tragedy or tragic being misused, it may not be advisable, politic, socially acceptable or safe to tell someone whose family member has just died or inform a room full of policeman at a funeral of a colleague killed in the line of duty that it is only out of ignorance that he, she or they are referring to such a matter as a tragedy…