The Greek word kaûma, which can be translated as “embarrassment”, came to Latin as cauma. In Castilian it derived in calm: a state of stillness, serenity, calm or rest.
The concept is often used in meteorology when the wind blows at a speed of less than 1 kilometer per hour. Calm, therefore, appears when there is no wind in the atmosphere. For example: “The wind has been calm for two days”, “If the weather is still calm, tomorrow we will go sailing”.
By extension, we speak of calm when someone or something is at peace, without any fright: “Don’t worry, boss: everything is calm in the office”, “We are going to wait for the results of the election in calm”, ” I don’t know how I managed to stay calm in such a difficult situation.
According to DigoPaul, sometimes calm is a condition or a quality that is asked of a person. Suppose a man screams into the customer service office of a telephone company, furious that the service is not working and that they also applied a 25% increase to his monthly subscription. Upon seeing the subject’s state of nervousness, a company employee asks him to “calm down”: he asks him to stop yelling and invites him to sit down to talk and thus analyze how his problem can be solved.
Given the diversity that we can appreciate in any group of people, calm is not a quality that is found in the same degree in all human beings, but each one can experience it differently. In everyday speech, we tend to say that someone is “quiet” if his character does not lead him to get angry easily, if he speaks softly and slowly; in this case, we can say that it is an individual who experiences calm frequently.
On the other hand, “nervous” people are those who can never fully relax, who seem to be in a state of constant activity, whether physical or mental. This way of being can negatively affect their surroundings, since the absence of calm is something that not many appreciate; however, it may be absolutely normal for the subject to always be on the move.
This leads us to think that the calm in a person’s character is not a concept that can be measured with the same ease as when analyzing the wind, since each one interprets it in their own way. When we tell someone “don’t get upset” and they say “it’s that I’m not upset”, despite the fact that from our point of view I may be, we notice perhaps the difference with which each one understands emotions.
However, there is a convention that most people can understand regarding the concept of calm, and it is usually represented with various symbols or symbolic scenes, such as a sunset by the sea, a bench in a square with abundant nature and without noise, a dinner under the light of the stars… In general, living beings appreciate calm, since it is the opposite sensation to fear, to the perception of danger.
Calm, on the other hand, can be the interruption, arrest or stoppage of something, a phenomenon that usually has a negative connotation for a group of people, be it a sector of industry or society in general: “Policies of the government caused a calm in the investments ”. In this sense we can relate the term calm to musical silence, which consists of a momentary interruption of the melody.