Make Your Point > Archived Issues > HAMARTIA
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If you've read or watched John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, you might remember Hazel chiding Augustus, a cancer survivor, for smoking cigarettes, an idiotic thing to do. She calls it his hamartia, then defines the word for him. "A fatal flaw," she says.
"Hamartia" comes from the Greek hamartanein, "to miss the mark," or less literally, "to sin, or to make a mistake."
Part of speech:
Well, you might never get to!
"Kennedy's ruthlessness and ambition, which are treated as the family's hamartia in Chappaquiddick, are swept under the rug of his compassion [in Bobby Kennedy For President]."
Explain the meaning of "hamartia" without saying "flaw" or "downfall."
Parodying Colin Powell, the former United States secretary of state, Alexandra Petri joked:
Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.
1.
The opposite of a HAMARTIA could be
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