the.com/dysfunction
When the system works exactly as badly as it was built to.
means The failure of something — a body part, a family, an organization — to work the way it's supposed to.
from Built from the Greek-derived prefix 'dys-' (bad, abnormal, difficult — the same one in 'dystopia' and 'dyslexia') plus 'function,' from Latin 'functio' (a performing, an executing), rooted in 'fungi,' to perform or discharge a duty. So 'dysfunction' is, quite literally, a performing gone wrong — first used in medicine for organs that wouldn't do their job, later stretched to cover families, offices, and entire governments doing theirs just as poorly.
- origin
- medical term before it colonized office small talk
- family version
- everyone agrees who started it, nobody agrees how
- comfort
- often just two reasonable people, no shared vocabulary
- fix rate
- naming it helps less than people hope