Following the terrorist attacks in Brussels on Tuesday March 22nd, the Merriam-Webster online dictionary saw a spike in people looking up the definition of the word “surreal.”
It’s not surprising; many witnesses are using the word to describe scenes in the city after the attacks.
“An hour before we were sitting [in the departure hall]. It was surreal,” one witness told The Guardian. “It was all a bit surreal,” a Greenpeace worker told the Irish Times. “Brussels Lockdown Photos Show City in Surreal Light as Armed Troops Patrol Empty Streets,” a Huffington Post UK title reads.
“Surreal is looked up frequently following tragedies, including 9/11, the Newtown shootings, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the suicide of Robin Williams,” according to the Merriam-Webster team.
The term was coined after the surrealism artistic movement in the 1920s where artists sought to paint, show, or express illogical scenes as though they were true to real life. Part of the goal of the surrealist movement was influenced by the famous psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and sought to connect the artists' with their own dreams and unconscious minds.
By doing so, artists like Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and René Magritte believed we would get closer to what was actually "real."
Today the word means something that’s “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream," according to Merriam-Webster.
In the case of the Brussels attacks and other terrorism incidents around the world — that have sadly become all too common — it’s actually more of a nightmare.
