Barbarism is called the absence of civility, education, courtesy or respect. The concept, which comes from the Latin word barbaries, also refers to brutality and savagery.
For example: “What is happening in Syria is a barbarism that no one should tolerate”, “The match ended in a barbarism: two people died and dozens of injuries were recorded by the clashes between the followers of both teams”, “The people it no longer supports the barbarism of drug traffickers and demands concrete responses from the authorities ”.
The idea of barbarism is linked to the behavior of barbarians. This designation was granted, at different times in history, by certain peoples to others whom they considered inferior or uneducated. In the Middle Ages, for example, groups that attacked the Romans and spread through various European regions were often referred to as barbarians.
The barbarians, in this sense, were those who acted with violence and without respect for social norms. By extension, the state that the barbarians favored was called barbarism.
The period known as barbarism is characterized by the appropriation of the property of the enemies after the confrontations. Unfortunately, it was then that the human being began to consider women as an object, which men also took from their victims. Within this period we can distinguish three stages:
* lower: began with the creation of pottery. It is known that in almost all the communities clay was used to cover wooden or basketry vessels in order to make them resistant to fire, and that at the time these two materials stopped being used in pursuit of a completely clay-based design. This stage is also characterized by the presence of polygyny (a form of polygamy that only man can enjoy), the domestication of animals and the cultivation of food plants;
* Medium: the human being began to work metals (except for iron), to practice livestock and agriculture using irrigation systems. Marriage also arose at this stage of barbarism;
* top: iron foundry finally appears and the wheel, alphabet and iron plow are invented.
Nowadays, the concept of barbarism is often used to name what, due to its excessive cruelty or lack of civility, escapes from the usual in a community. Suppose serious incidents occur at a rock concert. A large part of the public causes destruction in the stadium, injures some police officers who work at the event and destroys cars and shops at the exit of the venue. In the journalistic chronicles, the reporters speak of barbarism since it was a situation out of control, where the laws were left aside and many people did not respect the basic criteria of coexistence and social behavior.
As a curious fact, in some countries, such as Argentina, the adjective barbarian has certain positive meanings, and is used to describe an exaggerated reaction, or things that generate a good impression on the interlocutor. For example, if we understand this term as synonymous with “extraordinary, excessive or great”, we can say that “When he found out that he had been expelled from school, his mother made a barbarous scandal”.
On the other hand, barbarian can be something “magnificent, striking or excellent”, as can be seen in the following example sentence: “The act was barbaric, much better than I expected. ” In this same context, it is possible to make use of the interjective phrase “how great” when we want to express “strangeness, admiration or amazement “. There are regions where, for cultural reasons, people learn these uses before those related to the origin of the words barbarian and barbarism.
