Shooter incident at elementary school in Uvalde, Texas - 19 children and 2 adults dead

interesting article on the word "tragedy"
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It’s the easiest word we reach for to describe things we often find indescribable, especially for politicians:

“We had a horrific tragedy overnight at UVA, lives were lost and families changed forever,” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin tweeted after the shooting there last month.

“We can’t and won’t prevent every tragedy,” said President Biden after the schoolhouse massacre in Uvalde, Tex., as he strained for the right words to look toward solutions.

“Our thoughts are with their families & everyone enduring another senseless tragedy,” former president Barack Obama tweeted after the 2017 mass killing at a concert in Las Vegas.

Tragedy. I’ve used the word hundreds of times over decades spent grappling with the precise words for human suffering — most recently when I wrote about the 10-year anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.

But this week, Timothy Kendall stopped me in the middle of my keyboard taps, re-upping a request he’d sent in a letter to the editor earlier this year: “Would The Post please, please, please stop using the utterly inadequate term ‘tragedy’ to refer to a mass murder?”..........

“Calling a school shooting (or a lynching, or the slave trade, or the Holocaust, or the Trail of Tears, or for that matter any deliberate murder) a ‘tragedy’ is like calling brain cancer a “headache,” he wrote.

Hmm. Okay, I’m listening.

“ ‘Tragedies’ are left in the wake of such things as hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, wildfires, accidents, epidemics, strokes, heart attacks, sudden illnesses,” he wrote. And, he said, “nothing reasonable can be done to stop or prevent them. ... The proper word for any deliberate murder is ‘atrocity.' ... Atrocities are somebody’s fault, often both the perpetrator’s and numerous enablers’, and they can often be stopped.”........

Let’s see what a dictionary says:

A tragedy is “an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident, crime, or natural catastrophe,” according to the Oxford-informed Google dictionary.

An atrocity is “an extremely wicked or cruel act, typically one involving physical violence or injury.”

That makes sense. Mass shootings — especially when we look at those clearly fueled by racism, politics, homophobia, antisemitism, sexism or, simply, pure evil — are atrocious.

“Words matter,” Kendall told me.

Of course. But will a semantic shift sway public opinion, framing our national bloodshed as something cruel, evil and, ultimately, preventable?

While the us of “tragedy” is not inherently political, it can be used to distance an event from its root causes. America is the only country to grapple with gun violence of this type and magnitude because, among other issues, Americans have seemingly endless access to guns.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/t...sedgntp&cvid=7f4458ad08df488c82fff1a05ba8f1e3