A cargo plane lands badly crashing into another plane and several vehicles resulting in five deaths.
The incident is widely reported as “tragic.”
But is it?
In the contemporary sense of the word, yes.
In its original Greek sense not at all.
That word is the adjective form of “tragedy” coined by Aristotle to describe the plays he witnessed. Those plays, such as “Oedipus Rex”, focused on a main character who was essentially good but had a weakness that led to a downfall. That weakness was termed a “tragic flaw,” and the drama that presented it was, thus, a “tragedy,” and the flawed character was a ‘tragic hero.”
Let’s check out the etymology of “tragedy” to see why it was applied to those plays. The answer is astoundingly uninformative: “tragedy” comes from words for “goat” and “song”. One can imagine, without researching it, that the connection might be to a goat skin worn in a religious ritual that involved singing. Perhaps the performers in plays so named wore goat skin costumes.
OK, so in this case etymology is not particularly useful. There appears to be no consensus among scholars as to why the plays that came to be called “tragedies” were so designated, but that designation for a kind of play is a long way from folks being killed in a bad plane landing. Should that word be applied to a fatal accident?
Based on its Aristotelian source It’s hard to answer in the affirmative. First, the Aristotelian term focused on the “tragic hero,” a good person with a character flaw that leads to a terrible ending. Oedipus, the character in the play Aristotle used, met his downfall because his pride demanded that he find out more of his personal history. I don’t have space here to explain why more than to say his name means “swollen foot” and that if he had been satisfied simply not to know why, things would have turned out better, but pride, his flaw, demanded an answer.
Today’s use of the word carries little, if anything, of the original emphasis on human agency as the cause of bad endings, with the crucial original ingredient that the bad ending is caused by a good person.
Probably none of the above will explain why that cargo plane crashed as it did. But I think we are stuck with the word for this senseless loss of life. To call it a “disaster” is a possibility but most “disasters” result from natural cause such as floods or hurricanes, not human agency although metaphorically some human actions are said to be disastrous because they lead to terrible results.
So, it appears we don’t have a good alternative to “tragedy” to characterize that crash. Some sort of human error is likely involved although there could have been a mechanical failure. Or perhaps an external factor such as weather conditions, as in floods or hurricanes or tornados. But if any of those possibilities are involved it seems a better choice of words would be “disaster” since human agency does not cause such natural events; rather, we humans are the victims of them.
We appear to be at a dead end. We need something much stronger than “unfortunate” to describe an accident such as this cargo plane crash. Perhaps if it turns out to be human error, we move a step closer to the Aristotelian concept, but we would be missing the crucial ingredient of a human character flaw, rather than something like poor judgment, or distraction, or inexperience.
If anything like that is involved, I’m not sure what adjective we should apply: “Unfortunate” seems too weak for loss of life, so, finally, “tragic” wins by default.