Collusion. Corruption. Covfefe. In 2017, it was easy to get distracted — and distraught — by President Trump’s Category 5 tweetstorms and the news cycles they drove.
And thanks to the connectedness we now experience through social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we often feel every newsworthy event with both apocalyptic urgency and a sense of fatigue that can paralyze us into hopelessness and inaction.
That’s why my nomination for the word that best characterizes 2017 is 危机, or wēijī, the Chinese word for “crisis.”
In 1959, John F. Kennedy, then still a senator, explained in a speech that “when written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters — one represents danger and one represents opportunity.”
In an essay originally published in 2005, Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, explains that this translation of wēijī is incorrect.
According to Mair, wēijī is most accurately translated as “a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry,” with no aspect of “opportunity” explicitly or even implicitly conveyed.
But John F. Kennedy was neither the first person nor the last to invoke the danger/opportunity trope. It dates back to at least 1938, and in our era, Condoleezza Rice, Al Gore, and many others have used it as well.
