The Word “Great” Means The Opposite Now
The language we use matters.
Americans love the word “great.”
We had a great war, a great depression, another great war, a great recession, and most recently a great resignation. One of the most famous books in American literature is called The Great Gatsby, and it’s about a bunch of horrible liars. That was the whole point. Now we’re having a great reset. It’s a nice way of saying we’ll never own anything again, and we’ll never be able to retire, no matter how hard we work.
Yeah, that sure sounds great.
It’s funny how we don’t use words like horrible, terrible, tragic, catastrophic, or devastating. We prefer to call them great or unprecedented, even though these things are happening over and over, with increasing predictability, after decades of warnings and predictions.
The word great feels intentional here, because it implies these things happened on a scale beyond our control, and there was nothing we could’ve done to prevent it from happening.
It suggests inevitability. It evokes the idea of gods and floods, and factors that we simply have no power over.
Except we do.
