Literary notes about Calamitous (AI summary)
Writers often employ “calamitous” to evoke a sense of profound disaster or ruin in both grand historical narratives and more intimate personal predicaments. The term appears to amplify the severity of crises—whether it is used to highlight the sweeping, almost inevitable downturn brought on by political decisions, as in the account of policy-induced turmoil ([1]), or to describe the devastating consequences borne by families and nations alike ([2], [3]). It is also deployed in more personal contexts, marking the dire and fateful nature of individual circumstances ([4], [5]). In all these instances, “calamitous” serves as a potent modifier that transforms ordinary misfortune into a pivotal, almost mythic, moment of downfall.
- The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous.
— from The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and James Madison - "The consequences of the battle of Glen Fruin were very calamitous to the family of Macgregor, who had already been considered as an unruly clan.
— from The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott - After the loss of the provinces, our capital itself, in these last and calamitous days, has been wrested from our hands by the Barbarians of the West.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon - While under sentence of death, Blake did not show a concern proportioned to his calamitous situation.
— from The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 1/2 being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841. by Camden Pelham - That good man made a calamitous mistake.
— from Charles Lewis Cocke, Founder of Hollins College by William Robert Lee Smith
