An essay on chaos that aims to be original has a difficult task. So much has been said and written on the subject in the last hundred years, and particularly in the twenty years since the popularization of “Chaos Theory,” that it is difficult to talk about it at length without resorting to the clichés and banalities generated by popular propaganda. culture. That this is so should not be surprising. Chaos, after all, is all around us. In the uncertainty of the stock market, in the tantrums of friendship, in the breaking of lamps and marriages, and in the gentle decay of snowflakes on window panes, in all the little accidents and ephemera of our lives, the universe reveals itself be a fundamentally chaotic place. So the clichés here are cosmic. But this is not so much an essay on chaos as it is an essay on language. What really interests me is the corpus of the word, the measured volume of sound that contains its multitude of meanings. And chaos, for all its symbolic weight, is just a little word: four letters, two syllables; hardly an imposing presence on the printed page. It's a small word, but a talismanic one. A Google search for chaos yields over 70 million results, touching on everything from postmodern literature to topological varieties, from laissez faire politics to the finer details of interior design and beyond. As we examine these diverse offerings, tracing the word's evolution from commonplace to cultural icon, it increasingly seems that the poets and pundits are right: We are indeed living in an age of chaos. But what drives us into "chaos"? Where do these two syllables derive their enormous multivalent power? How the long history of the word works, its profound religious... middle of paper... tumors, and misplaced commas, and the awareness that everything tends towards disorder, that the stars will go out and life on our planet is simply an energy debt incurred against the entropic forces of the universe, the recognition that there are no answers to the problems of poverty, crime, war and disease and that the choice between the ravages of revolution and the silent desperation of the status quo is not it has solution, and will never have solution, and severed toes, and missed trains, and faulty wiring, and faulty genes; in short, the sound and the fury, all the irrecoverable chaos of existence - that all this can be captured in a sound form, encapsulated in a single word and contrasted with the imperturbable cosmos of our being and our will, solitary and solipsized, smooth and resonant like the voice of a Greek tragic chorus, chaos.