What do you get when calm amity is alarmed by calumny and a call to military arms? Why, calamity, Jane.
Calamity names a bad thing – just about the worst – but it sure has an appropriate sound. To me it’s like a metal pot and lid falling to the floor, or perhaps an alarm bell on the wall in the hall ringing us all to panicked action.
But what is a calamity? If a house burns down, is the calamity the fire, or the loss of house and home? Or was it the match and the wooden timbers awaiting ignition? Per the Oxford English Dictionary, in English, at least, calamity was the effect first, and after that the cause: by 1490 calamity meant “the state or condition of grievous affliction or adversity; deep distress, trouble, or misery, arising from some adverse circumstance or event”; by 1552 it also meant “a grievous disaster, an event or circumstance causing loss or misery; a distressing misfortune.” So the loss of home is a calamity, and the fire that causes it is a calamity; but then we could also say the fire-prone conditions in presence of loose matches were a calamity, since they were the cause of the fire.
And, perhaps, so on. “Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity,” as Publilius Syrus is often quoted. This is not to say that bad luck comes in threes, but at least it’s either none or more than one. But can you separate cause from effect? Does not one carry within itself the seeds of the other, and the other on its branches bear the seeding fruit of the one? Thought, word, and deed come in order, but deeds lead to more thoughts, and so to words… Once you start the cycle, it keeps going – enough is never enough. Better to break the cycle… if you can.
Can you? And how? Hamlet had thoughts:
There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
That seems piercingly drastic, though. Why not simply elect to say enough is enough? If you go into one undiscovered country, after all, there may be more to follow. Laozi (Lao Tzu) – if there was such a person; he may just be a convenient fiction for the assembly of truisms – in his Dao de jing (Tao Te Ching; number 46) wrote,
禍莫大於不知足；
咎莫大於欲得。
故知足之足，常足矣。
Which can be translated variously, but Mary Barnard rendered it this way:
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.
There is no greater guilt than discontentment.
And there is no greater disaster than greed.
He who is contented with contentment is always contented.
And John C.H. Wu made it this:
There is no calamity like not knowing what is enough.
There is no evil like covetousness.
Only he who knows what is enough will always have enough.
Calamity in both translates 禍, huò, which can also be rendered as disaster or catastrophe; 禍 is formed from a radical 示 that, to quote L. Wieger’s Chinese Characters, has the sense of “influx coming from heaven, auspicious or inauspicious signs, by which the will of heaven is known to mankind” – it was formed from two horizontal lines signifying heaven and three vertical lines representing what is hanging from heaven (the sun, the moon, and the stars). The other translations of 禍 give us some pictures: disaster is from Latin for ‘bad star’ (like Romeo and Juliet, the star-crossed lovers – as Friar Laurence said to Romeo, “Thou art wedded to calamity”); catastrophe is from Greek for ‘down-stroke’ or ‘overturn’. But calamity?
There’s the respect that makes calamity of etymology. For, you see, calamity comes from calamitas, which means ‘loss, damage, harm, disaster, misfortune, et cetera’, but we’re not sure what calamitas descended from. Latin writers seemed to think it had something to do with calamus ‘straw, cornstalk’, but their explanations were a bit of a shipwreck. More modern scholars have reckoned it comes from calamis ‘damaged’, which seems right, but the problem is that it’s really *calamis – it’s a deductive reconstruction of a word that has not actually been seen in historical sources.
Meaning it came from somewhere, but, as with many a calamity, we’re not entirely sure where. The chaos of linguistic history is like the chaos of climate or of myriad other things: a butterfly flapping its wings – or a cornstalk breaking – might set in action a chain of events that lead to history-altering calamities. Or, on the other hand, it might simply be absorbed in the quotidian noise. And who knows which will eventuate?
Perhaps fortune does. …wherever fortune comes from. And as Darius Lyman’s version of Publilius Syrus’s Sententiæ says, “Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity.” The Latin original for which is…
…nonexistent. Sorry, you can (as I did) go at length through the original, searching and searching, and you won’t find a Latin equivalent of that. It turns out that Lyman was, hmm, fortune’s fool, or anyway fooling with fortune. The point is that he managed to include various verses in his version that can’t be traced to the source. They’re just convenient fictions, it seems, spontaneously generated.
Well, at least they’re true. Or are they? They’re sententious, but, you know, “words, words, words…”
Or, as the Duchess of York (the woman who gave birth to Richard III) said in Shakespeare’s Richard III, “Why should calamity be full of words?” And, I suppose, for the sake of conversation, why the converse as well?
Sesquiotica 