the.com/happening
The word you use when you refuse to name what's actually going wrong.
means A vague, all-purpose word for an event or situation, used precisely when you want to describe something without committing to details about what it is.
from From 'happen,' rooted in the Middle English 'hap,' meaning luck or chance — the same root that gives us 'happy,' 'haphazard,' and 'perhaps.' So buried in 'happening' is the ghost of randomness itself: something that simply fell out of chance, with no cause assigned. The noun sense got a jolt in the 1960s art world, when 'happening' became the term for loosely structured, deliberately unscripted performance art — events engineered to feel like they were just occurring, spontaneously, before your eyes.
- grammar tell
- present participle pretending nothing has a cause
- 60s usage
- meant spontaneous art event, no script, no plan
- breakup version
- something's happening with us usually means something ended
- vagueness power
- describes any event without admitting you understand it