What Does fatal Mean
The term fatal is an adjective that comes from the Latin word funestus . The concept is used to qualify that which is unfortunate or painful or that is the cause of suffering .
For example: “In this disastrous sector of the highway there have been five accidents in the last year that caused the death of eight people” , “The footballer grew up in a disastrous home, with a beating father and a mother who forced him to ask alms in the street ” , “ If we do not begin to respect the institutions, our country will have a disastrous destiny ” .
The unfortunate, as can be seen in the examples just given, is something unfortunate or painful . Take the case of a soccer team preparing to play a momentous match: if it wins, it reaches the top of the tournament. However, he ends up losing four to zero , his figure is injured and he suffers the expulsion of three players who will receive several suspension dates as punishment. Faced with this reality, journalists speak of a disastrous match for the group in question.
A man, on the other hand, can confess that he has a disastrous past : he was addicted to drugs and was in prison for committing robberies. Upon regaining his freedom, this individual modified his behavior, overcame his addiction and managed to reintegrate himself into society . That is why you can maintain that your past was disastrous, while your current reality is very different.
There are events or phenomena that are considered dire by the vast majority of people. The Nazis , to cite one case, it was a fateful move that caused millions of deaths .
Let's see below some of the various synonyms that the word fatal has , thanks to which it is easier to understand the full depth of its meaning: unfortunate, unfortunate, fatal , fateful, mournful, dire and unfortunate . Here we find some words of daily use, such as being nefarious and unhappy , that can be used to describe an accident, for example, to emphasize its bloody and unfortunate nature.
There is, however, among these synonyms one that tends to cause a lot of confusion for Spanish speakers: fatal . While it is true that it can be used in the sense of unfortunate , its main definition refers to a person or thing that predicts or announces the future , especially if it is an unfortunate one. It is necessary to emphasize the fact that fatal is not the same as "fatal", even though they are so similar and can be used interchangeably in certain situations.
Precisely in this framework we must point out that the word fatal is not always used to describe an event, something that has happened, but to reflect the discomfort or negative feelings that arise from a person or an event. Something fatal can go through several stages, starting with one in which it is perceived that misfortune is yet to come and another in which it has already affected the protagonists.
When we talk about the biography of a person who died in a tragic way and who previously lost his loved ones in unfortunate situations, we can say that his story is disastrous, although there are also happy moments in it. It is precisely in this breadth of the term, in its ability to point towards a terrible future from a present that can be peaceful that it differs from some of its more precise synonyms, useful to adjective the misfortune itself and not all the events that led To her.
There is also a nuance that leads us to use the term fatal once the misfortune has occurred and not from the first day of the negative period, although this is not mandatory. We usually describe the mandate of a dictator as disastrous once it has ended or after a time of having endured its negative consequences .