Predestination is a heck of a drug. It imbues every moment with some kind of tremendous import. Meeting a new person? It was destined to happen. Lost or found something important to you? Meant to be, now you just need to figure out why. Every action was predetermined by a trillion little domino-falls set in motion by the formation of the very fabric of space-time. You reading this blog post? It could never have happened any other way.
So yeah, I can see why someone might want to believe that fate drives all of their actions. On top of making everything feel important, it also removes your personal responsibility in life. One of those "ignorance is bliss" siblings, I believe. But that would mean we were predestined to find the word 'fatal' in the circumstances it is in, cut off from its roots in the strangest, yet still heavily related, way.
Now, as is fate with these posts, I'll ask you for a favor. Define 'fatal' in your head. What did you get? Adj. something something death? Very nice, very nice. Worth noting that depending on context 'fatal' may not always be referring to the termination of a life, right? Like, a computer program having a fatal flaw doesn't mean someone is going to die, just that the program is going to figuratively "die" and crash or simply fail to work.
Unless the QA department at the developer is way more hardcore than they have any business being.
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| Uh, sure. Thanks Google. |
But yeah, if you overhear your doctor say that there's a fatal flaw with the drug they just administered to you that's probably a pretty good indication you ought to call up some loved ones and say goodbye. In modern English the word is pretty well defined, and even when used in conjunction with something that wasn't alive to begin with the severity is intact. It's nothing less than the figurative death of the subject matter.
Glad we're all on the same page. Now time for a second favor; go ahead and try and think quietly to yourself (seriously Chels you have got to stop shouting these out) about the root of 'fatal'. What's the word upon which it's based?
Some of you see where I'm going with this. Because look at it; it sure as crap ain't 'death'. No, the word upon which 'fatal' is based comes to us from Old French, same as 'fatal' did in the late 1300s. It's 'fate'. And while sure, you can say with perfect accuracy that the fate of all life on Earth is death, people also say they feel like it was fate that they met the person of their dreams, or they got the job they've always wanted, or a million other positive, non-death-related things about their lives. 'Fate' does not mean 'death', it falls much more in line with where we started this post; predestination.
So why does 'fatal' mean 'death' then? Shouldn't it mean something more along the lines of, well... fated? Adj. something something meant to be? Well yeah. You're absolutely right. It should. And it did, back in the late 1300s when it showed up in English. The etymology is pretty much unbroken from there all the way back through Latin and Greek to PIE as being along the lines of "decreed by fate".
But as is the common theme of this series, once the word hit English it entered a land of few rules and even fewer people that cared about the rules. Over time the meaning shifted through twists and turns that are impossible to reproduce with any kind of accuracy, until we see the first instance of it used as a shorthand for "causing or attended with death" circa early 15c. A total elapsed time of, at best, 50 years.
But perhaps my favorite detail in this little saga is the word 'fated' sitting pretty much right where 'fatal' used to. It took over 100 years before someone codified that little nugget into existence, suggesting that in common use 'fatal' managed to keep a dual meaning for at least that long. But then, in the early 1700s, somebody realized there was no adjective sense of the concept of "fate", so they made one up.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
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