The term funest is an adjective that comes from the Latin word funestus . The concept is used to describe that which is unfortunate or painful or that is the cause of suffering .
For example: «In this disastrous section of the road 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 beg alms in the street" , "If we do not start respecting the institutions, our country will have a disastrous destiny" .
The disastrous, as can be seen in the examples just presented, is something unfortunate or that causes pain . Let's take the case of a soccer team that is preparing to play a transcendent match: if it wins, it reaches the top of the tournament. However, they end up losing four to zero , their figure is injured and three players are expelled and will receive several suspension dates as punishment. Faced with this reality, journalists speak of a disastrous match for the team 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 into society . That is why he can maintain that his past was disastrous, while his current reality is very different.
There are events or phenomena that are considered disastrous by the vast majority of people. Nazism , to cite one case, was a disastrous movement that caused millions of deaths .
Let's see below some of the various synonyms that the word disastrous has, thanks to which it is easier to understand the full depth of its meaning: unfortunate , unfortunate, fatal , fateful, mournful, disastrous and unfortunate . Here we find some everyday words, such as disastrous and unfortunate , which can be used to describe an accident, for example, to place special emphasis on its bloody and unfortunate nature.
There is, however, among these synonyms one that usually generates a lot of confusion for Spanish speakers: fateful . While it is true that it can be used in the sense of fateful , 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 fateful 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 dire is not always used to describe an event, something that has happened, but to reflect the discomfort or negative sensations that arise from a person or an event. Something disastrous can go through several stages, starting with one in which it is perceived that the misfortune is about 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 sad, although there are also happy moments in it. It is precisely in this broadness 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 describe the misfortune itself and not all the events that led to it. towards 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 a dictator's rule as disastrous once it has ended or after a time of having endured its negative consequences .