Recasting “imaginable and unimaginable” in disaster scenarios and management

The critic, Christopher Ricks, elaborates an insight from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):

“Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.” Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240

This notion that humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive. That we start with unimaginable disasters and work our way to making them imaginable didn’t really to me.

Currently, we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. We don’t say, at least in my experience: As there are disasters indescribably catastrophic, we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order to think about them. That way we frame what we think we know and don’t about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened here.

So what? Frankly, neither term, imaginable nor unimaginable, is good enough for the present. The skills we are talking about are those of making more or less (un)imaginable.