Casual/Casualty

Filed Under January 2008, columns 

Dear Word Detective: This morning I was watching my daily dose of Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns, and Buffy said that she didn’t like the word “casualty” because it makes death sound so “casual.” That made me realize that I can’t think of any obvious origin. Can you help explain? Are the two words really related? — Elisabeth.

Sheesh, here we go with the Buffy again. Alright, already, I get it. I should have watched the show when it was on. Who knew that it would turn out to be the Rosetta stone of 21st century Western Culture? But I’ll make you Buffy fans a deal. I’ll watch it in reruns if you can somehow get me back all the hours I wasted watching The Sopranos. I now associate the Mafia with narcolepsy. “Rome,” however, was quite good.

“Casual” and “casualty” are indeed related, but that doesn’t mean that there is anything “casual,” in our modern sense of “relaxed” or “informal,” about a “casualty.” Buffy should be more careful about attempting to reverse-engineer words, because she got bitten rather badly on this one.

The root of both “casual” and “casualty” is the Latin “casus,” meaning “event.” This “casus” is also the source of our English word “case,” which originally (in the 13th century) meant simply “an event or happening,” but later came to mean “an instance of something happening” or “the state of matters regarding a thing or person,” as in “Your case is an interesting one, but the chances of conviction are good.”

The case of “casual” and “casualty” is one common in English: two closely-related words appear with similar meanings, but then diverge through the centuries as popular usage finds new uses for them. When “casual” first appeared in English in the 14th century, it carried the sense of “by chance, accidental,” often with overtones of good luck. “Casual” has kept this sense of “by accident, unplanned” through the centuries since, as we speak of a serendipitous “casual encounter” with a friend while shopping. Applied to persons, “casual” in the 19th century came to mean “unreliable, haphazard” or, in a more forgiving light, “happy-go-lucky, free-spirited.” By the early 20th century, we were using “casual” to mean “unconcerned” and “indifferent,” the sense Buffy was using.

“Causalty” began in a similar vein in the early 15th century (in the now-obsolete form “casuality”), meaning “a chance or accident.” But by the late 15th century “casualty” was more often used to mean “an unfortunate accident or occurrence,” and soon took on its modern military meaning of “losses due to wounds, death or desertion,” and an individual soldier wounded or killed came to be known as a “casualty.” Strictly speaking, the “wounded or killed” definition of “casualty” still applies, but it is not uncommon to hear only soldiers killed being referred to as “casualties.”

 

 

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