Casualty
- Pronunciation: \ˈka-zhəl-tē, ˈkazh-wəl-, ˈka-zhə-wəl-\
- Function: noun
- Inflected Form(s): plural ca·su·al·ties
- Date: 15th century
1 archaic : chance, fortune
3 a: a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture or through being missing in action b: a person or thing injured, lost, or destroyed
****
How has this word - casualty - lost its shadow? - that evidence at our feet that what looms above has mass, has density, has reality. That shadow that swallows our own as whatever-it-is passes overhead. Maybe this is one reason why Plato's "forms" fell out of favor? Those looming perfects in which everything participated had no shadow, they never actually participated in the world. We could never stand beside them and judge our height against theirs by comparing the length of our shadows in the evening. They were said to somehow loom above us, but they never touched us, never did our shadows meet. (The mystery of the Incarnation.)
But "casualty," how can casualty not have a shadow? It's reality, its weight, its shadow is attested by every grieving mother, every nameless grave, every obituary. The word carries with it the sense of "victim," and often of death, of tragedy. So maybe the shadow is still there, maybe the word does cast a shadow. Maybe it's just that we have let our eyes adjust to the darkness. It's not an etymological mistake that the root of the word is "casual." And as our language has gently modified "casual" from a sense of chance to a sense of nonchalance or unconcern ("casual sex"), so too has "casualty" lost its vitality, its depth, its shadow, or rather, we have diluted our perception of it.
Casualties are those lost by accident, victims of what is done casually. What, then, separates those lost in war and those who have casual sex - can we call them both "casualties"? Do we? Or, what of those who suffer because "casually" going about our own lives leads to their suffering - are they "casualties"? Or, maybe more revealing, what does it mean that ordinary, every-day attire, and sex with strangers both take on the same predicate? And from which sense of the word, if we are using them in two different senses at all, do we draw from when we say "casualty"?
How we use our words reveals our common life together. That we can communicate and understand one another reveals a common understanding, a communal acceptance of definitions, definitions that are always changing, but never arbitrarily. When we use one and the same word for Friday business attire and lives shattered by bullets and bombshells, it reveals either our disgust for the ordinary or an acceptance of the unacceptable, of the atrocious. Either the ordinary has become hideous, or the hideous has become ordinary. And, as the ordinary is the acceptable, I fear that it is the latter. I fear that our eyes and our tongues have learned all too well how to see and speak in and with darkness. We have, in a very frightening sense, become acclimated to our disorders, to our brokenness. Our language gives us away.
****
I have two friends who are married to each other, and are going through a very difficult time in that marriage. The difficulty, or difficulties, are not big, hot-topic issues like adultery or abuse. Rather, it's the small, ordinary things. It's those continual mistakes that have become par for the course. It is all the accidents that have come to constitute a character. Namely, the wife has become a casualty in the marriage, a victim to casualties - those ignorant and negligent acts of the husband. Now, though a casualty is a victim, the word seems to carry a sense that the pain or death inflicted was unintentional, it "just happened," it could not have been avoided. So, when I say she is a "casualty" I am not implying that she suffers any kind of physical or verbal abuse, I am merely saying that she suffers what could be understood as "just the way things are."
But there is the problem. She could be a casualty, I might be able to use that word. Can I? Can we? Do we? What do we say when...? That all depends, I guess, on what we take as casual, on what we understand to be more than casual, more than accidental. The moral problem begins with the words with which the moral problem is posed. Who and what are true casualties? What do we mean by casual?
I am not calling for a singular, all-encompassing definition, but for an examination of how we already use the word. Then, I hope, will we begin to see the shadow cast by "casualty." Then (and only then?) will the word again carry weight, density. Then will we understand the state we are in. My hope is that we will again be able to feel the chill when our own existence becomes entangled, and swallowed, in the shadow such a word does cast.
3 a: a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture or through being missing in action b: a person or thing injured, lost, or destroyed
****
How has this word - casualty - lost its shadow? - that evidence at our feet that what looms above has mass, has density, has reality. That shadow that swallows our own as whatever-it-is passes overhead. Maybe this is one reason why Plato's "forms" fell out of favor? Those looming perfects in which everything participated had no shadow, they never actually participated in the world. We could never stand beside them and judge our height against theirs by comparing the length of our shadows in the evening. They were said to somehow loom above us, but they never touched us, never did our shadows meet. (The mystery of the Incarnation.)
But "casualty," how can casualty not have a shadow? It's reality, its weight, its shadow is attested by every grieving mother, every nameless grave, every obituary. The word carries with it the sense of "victim," and often of death, of tragedy. So maybe the shadow is still there, maybe the word does cast a shadow. Maybe it's just that we have let our eyes adjust to the darkness. It's not an etymological mistake that the root of the word is "casual." And as our language has gently modified "casual" from a sense of chance to a sense of nonchalance or unconcern ("casual sex"), so too has "casualty" lost its vitality, its depth, its shadow, or rather, we have diluted our perception of it.
Casualties are those lost by accident, victims of what is done casually. What, then, separates those lost in war and those who have casual sex - can we call them both "casualties"? Do we? Or, what of those who suffer because "casually" going about our own lives leads to their suffering - are they "casualties"? Or, maybe more revealing, what does it mean that ordinary, every-day attire, and sex with strangers both take on the same predicate? And from which sense of the word, if we are using them in two different senses at all, do we draw from when we say "casualty"?
How we use our words reveals our common life together. That we can communicate and understand one another reveals a common understanding, a communal acceptance of definitions, definitions that are always changing, but never arbitrarily. When we use one and the same word for Friday business attire and lives shattered by bullets and bombshells, it reveals either our disgust for the ordinary or an acceptance of the unacceptable, of the atrocious. Either the ordinary has become hideous, or the hideous has become ordinary. And, as the ordinary is the acceptable, I fear that it is the latter. I fear that our eyes and our tongues have learned all too well how to see and speak in and with darkness. We have, in a very frightening sense, become acclimated to our disorders, to our brokenness. Our language gives us away.
****
I have two friends who are married to each other, and are going through a very difficult time in that marriage. The difficulty, or difficulties, are not big, hot-topic issues like adultery or abuse. Rather, it's the small, ordinary things. It's those continual mistakes that have become par for the course. It is all the accidents that have come to constitute a character. Namely, the wife has become a casualty in the marriage, a victim to casualties - those ignorant and negligent acts of the husband. Now, though a casualty is a victim, the word seems to carry a sense that the pain or death inflicted was unintentional, it "just happened," it could not have been avoided. So, when I say she is a "casualty" I am not implying that she suffers any kind of physical or verbal abuse, I am merely saying that she suffers what could be understood as "just the way things are."
But there is the problem. She could be a casualty, I might be able to use that word. Can I? Can we? Do we? What do we say when...? That all depends, I guess, on what we take as casual, on what we understand to be more than casual, more than accidental. The moral problem begins with the words with which the moral problem is posed. Who and what are true casualties? What do we mean by casual?
I am not calling for a singular, all-encompassing definition, but for an examination of how we already use the word. Then, I hope, will we begin to see the shadow cast by "casualty." Then (and only then?) will the word again carry weight, density. Then will we understand the state we are in. My hope is that we will again be able to feel the chill when our own existence becomes entangled, and swallowed, in the shadow such a word does cast.
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