Jedward win would be ‘disaster’ — Simon Cowell

It will come as little surprise to the regular readers of Inside Back that I have never watched an episode of the X-Factor. I do know, however, who Simon Cowell is.

And today, as I write this, the big news is that Cowell has said that if Jedward wins X-Factor – Jedward are two teenage Irish boys who can’t sing – it will be a ‘disaster’, and he will leave the UK.

The word ‘disaster’ originated in late 16th century from the Italian disastro, an ‘ill-starred event’. And that word came from the Latin dis- (expressing negation) and astro ‘star’ (from astrum, from Greek astron).

The sense is astrological, of a calamity blamed on an unfavourable position of a planet.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the definition of the word disaster is ‘an occurrence causing widespread destruction and distress; a catastrophe’ or ‘a grave misfortune’.

But disaster first appeared in English in the late 16th century, and Shakespeare would use the word in King Lear.

The word disaster used to convey the idea that a catastrophe could be traced to the ‘evil influence of a star or planet’.

That definition is obsolete. But it was not obsolete in the 16th century.

The standard definition now is something like: 1) An unexpected natural or man-made catastrophe of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life or sometimes permanent change to the natural environment. Or 2) An unforeseen event causing great loss, upset or unpleasantness of whatever kind.

From Wikipedia (there was always going to be a Wikipedia reference in this):
“In contemporary academia, disasters are seen as the consequence of inappropriately managed risk. These risks are the product of hazards and vulnerability. Hazards that strike in areas with low vulnerability are not considered a disaster, as is the case in uninhabited regions.

“Developing countries suffer the greatest costs when a disaster hits – more than 95 per cent of all deaths caused by disasters occur in developing countries, and losses due to natural disasters are 20 times greater (as a percentage of GDP) in developing countries than in industrialized countries.

“A disaster can be defined as any tragic event with great loss stemming from events such as earthquakes, floods, catastrophic accidents, fires, or explosions.�

But there are also man-made disasters – disasters caused by human action, negligence, error, or involving the failure of a system. Man-made disasters are in turn categorised as technological or sociological.

Technological disasters are the results of failure of technology, such as engineering failures, transport disasters, or environmental disasters. Sociological disasters have a strong human motive, such as criminal acts, stampedes, riots and war. - Irish Medical Times