Peripeteia

I was looking at a word-of-the-day calendar the other day and the word was peripeteia. I didn’t remember what the word meant, but I remembered that I heard someone use it in a presentation.

Eventually I remembered that Mike Rowe had used peripeteia in his TED talk. The word means a sudden or unexpected reversal of circumstances. Rowe begins his talk by describing a peripeteia moment he had while castrating sheep. He uses this story to illustrate how our ideas about work can be very wrong.