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Mass shootings, bus crashes, tornadoes, terrorist attacks — we've gotten adept at talking about these things. Act of God or act of man, they're all horrific. At least that was the word you kept hearing from politicians and newscasters describing the Boston bombings and the explosion at the fertilizer plant in Texas.

That may not strike you as surprising — the events were horrific, weren't they? But it's actually a new way of describing things. "Horrific" is an old word; it turns up in Thackeray and Melville. But until recent times it was rare and literary. It didn't start to take off until a few decades ago, and it's been on a tear ever since — 10 times as common now as it was in 1970. Words sometimes catch on that way, like a pair of boots you've had in the back of the closet for years until one morning you pull them out and start wearing them every day.

But why now? I wondered if it had to do with the bleaching of "horrible." Milton used "horrible" for the dungeons of hell; now we use it for bad hairdos. But "horrific" doesn't mean the same thing as "horrible" or "horrifying" — it's not just a fancy word for "scary." The way it's used now, "horrific" doesn't describe events themselves so much as the reaction they evoke. Horrific sights are the ones that transfix and repel us at the same time. I asked a friend what he thought the word meant, and he sent me a link to a photo that appeared last month after the University of Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware suffered a gruesome leg fracture during an NCAA game. It showed three of his teammates at courtside. The one in the middle had his arms around the other two and was gaping at the injury in wide-eyed horror. The one on his right had turned away, his face twisted in anguish. The one on his left was staring ashenly up into space. Those are the three faces of the horrific: We gawk, pull back convulsively, and finally turn away shaken.

“ Those are the three faces of the horrific: We gawk, pull back convulsively, and finally turn away shaken."