Apparently it's not a new word; Google Ngram viewer seems to indicate its coinage in the early 1970s. I first encountered it yesterday reading an op-ed lament on parenting which expressed concern about how to help today's children deal with climate change + coronavirus + war ......
It's a good word, useful for describing our current lives.
I'm not sure, but I think 0.0000000421% is a very, very small amount.
ReplyDeleteLike, around 4 people out of the world's population.
FYI for anyone not aware: the denominator isn't people, it's words. Specifically, words contained within Google Books. In their example, "kindergarten" is pretty steady at .0003%, which works out to about 3 words per million if I did the math right. https://books.google.com/ngrams/info#
DeleteSo permacrisis peaked around 1 per 2.3 billion... sounds about right for a modern-coined word I'd never heard of before.
Would have been a useful word to describe some of the mothers of kids I grew up with. They would have short crisis and long crisis but always overlapped so never without.
ReplyDeleteAbout the graph: I'm thinking word usage, but I don't understand how value is assigned on the Y axis. I like word usage graphs, tho.
ReplyDeleteAs to the word: Isn't crisis episodic by definition? If there is a permanent state of crisis, perhaps that becomes the new norm and it's not crisis anymore, but predicament. As in, our environmental predicament. So, a crisis has a beginning, middle and end. An ecocidal spiral has a beginning, middle and end, and I guess that's episodic, in a sense, but...hmmm. Well, maybe that's a permacrisis, given it now spans entire lifetimes. Okay, this is a psychological term. I'm starting to warm up to it. It's akin to existential angst.
I checked the etymology, and you are correct that a crisis is by definition episodic - typically a "turning point" in a confrontation where the situation/disease/battle either gets worse or better.
DeleteI'm thinking perhaps the best usage for modern times is not that a given crisis is persistent, but that one crisis is followed by another, then by another, so that there is always a crisis of some sort to deal with.
So, if we are in a period of environmental collapse, there will be crisis after crisis, presumably more frequent. The discrete, or immediate, within the overall, big picture pattern. (One train, many cars.) Maybe it's a plural, concept, as in permacrises. A permanent state wherein catastrophic events are ever more frequent and/or chronologically overlapping. Anyway, thanks for introducing me to the word and making me ponder this'n.
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