Unfortunately, “event” is one of those words which has become so common and so casually used that it is often overused. Think about it: there are current events, historical events, events relative to places, people, virtually anything – even reading this article could be considered an event. Considering the broad meaning of this word and its strong usage relative to what anyone considers to be important, it would be a puzzling process to try and cite different examples, but what about the word itself?
Our word event originated as a combination of the Latin words ex venire, meaning “to come out of,” which is essentially what events are – they are a differentiation that comes out of the norm, such as the sacking of Rome in 410AD (the first time in 8 centuries) or, to use a more modern reference, the American Revolution’s rejection of status quo colonialism. As our word moved through Middle French (as event), it acquired a new meaning as “the consequence of something,” such as when used in the phrase “in the event that,” which can be found throughout any legal or employment contract. The real explosion of differentiating usages came about when the word entered English at the beginning of the 17th century: event has, since then, been used in reference to sports, as a timetable for astrophysical happenings (event horizon), and even as an explanation (the course of events).
The first known use of our word in English comes from 1602 in a work by William Fulbecke, titled A Parallele or Conference of the Civill Law, where he writes that, “I could not but expect the event of so good a thing.” Circa 1616, the word was used by William Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus: “ To Order well the State, That like Events, may never it Ruinate.” Though these primary usages deal with occurrences, perhaps the usage that is most responsible for opening the proverbial floodgates for our word’s meaning can be found in Alfred North Whitehead’s 1919 work, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, “The ‘constants of externality’ are those characteristics of a perpetual experience which it possesses..when we apprehend it. A fact which possesses these characteristics, namely these constants of externality, is what we call an ‘event’,” essentially meaning that virtually anything can be considered an event.
