I never did grasp the mythological or spiritual significance of the red and white polka dot mushrooms, but I admired the Malaysians for their ability, in a constitutionally Islamic State, to so openly display the symbols of the Christian day of rebirth.

I was even more appreciative of it when I arrived home in Australia to newspaper reports of Australians who felt respect for their Muslim friends required them to hide all public reference to the Christmas feast, banning not only the religious element but the secular displays of carols and Father Christmas. They could learn much about the meaning of 'multiculturalism' from their Muslim Malaysian neighbours!

Unfortunately Christmas brought another word to our attention this year: tsunami.

What seemed like a terrible death toll in the first few days would become unimaginable in the days to follow, understandable only from the reality of the photographs and films.

Back here in Kuala Lumpur for New Year, I found myself looking up the definition of tsunami in dictionaries. Perhaps it was a wordsmith's way of seeking meaning for it all. In the end I thought the simplicity of the Collins Advanced Learners' English Dictionary was the quintessential statement: 'a very large wave, often caused by an earthquake, that flows onto the land and destroys things'.

After so many images of faces and bodies and buildings and rubble, so simple a word as 'things' takes on a multilevel meaning that is numbing for all it conveys, forcing humility on us with its reminder that life, like the sand, is so easily swept away.

Tsunami is a Japanese word, derived from tsu, harbour, and nami, wave. These simple words combine into a new word that seems onomatopoeic of the sudden swift fury and force of the wave.

It is not surprising that English has adopted so expressive a word. The English 'tidal wave' - admittedly an incorrect term - has nothing of the emotional portent of tsunami. Nor do we gain anything by correcting our science and calling it a 'seismic sea wave', the term used commonly in oceanography books, at least at the layman's level.

Translating it to 'harbour wave' adds nothing to the language; if it did, we'd have adopted the translation and dropped 'tsunami': English is nothing if not imperialistic! Besides, 'harbour wave' has other connotations that distract - not least, a welcoming wave to those come home from the sea.

When English adopts words from other languages, it usually selects the best. No doubt there were other words that might have been adopted - the Ryuku Islanders, for instance, almost certainly have their own terms - but it was 'tsunami' that was taken to the lexical heart. True, the adoption has been tentative until now, and many still get the name wrong, but no longer: tsunami is now a part of the language in a way it never was before December 26, 2004.

Nor is it surprising that the Japanese found their own lexical value in this word. They have, after all, had greater need than us: the biggest and the most destructive tsunamis in recorded history were, until last month, in Japan.

The most destructive tsunami was in 1703, when an estimated 100,000 people were killed when the wave swept across Aura Island on the Japanese coast. The death toll this time has been greater but that also reflects the vastly increased global population in 2004 relative to three centuries ago.

The highest tsunami was also recorded in Japan, off the coast of the southern Ryuku Island. The peak wave of the tsunami that hit the islands in 1971 was 85 m high.

I think of our home at Scarborough, fully 27 m above sea level, on the first high dune in from the beach, and realise such a wave would dump the debris of our lives along the Darling escarpment.

The talk here in Malaysia remains focussed on the tragedy. The death toll has been mercifully light compared to Indonesia and other countries, but still the community has been shaken and greatly saddened. New Year celebrations were cancelled to show sympathy and respect to those dead or grieving.

Nor is the loss only local. So many tourists have died too, carrying the wave of mourning far across Europe and North America. A friend from Nexen's Calgary office was holidaying with her husband on Pattani: they were seriously injured but are recovering in a Bangkok hospital.

The wording of articles and letters in the local papers revealed the difficulties people faced in comprehending the scale and implication of it all. Earth is so often described as fragile; environments and ecosystems as different as swamp and savannah are all seen as desperately needing protection from human activities. Suddenly, Earth has revealed its own agenda, and care for humanity was not part of it.

Perhaps there has been subliminal comfort in the idea that Earth needs our care so much. Caring infers an authority: we remained masters of nature. Clearly, we were not.

Earth processes familiar to geoscientists became the stuff of headlines. Plate tectonics and continental drift were daily items. Diagrams illustrated the Sunda, Burma and Indian plates colliding. The Richter Scale was a common topic. The pattern and history of earthquake activity was dissected for clues about the future. Seismological recordings of aftershocks were anxiously reviewed.

Earth was no longer seen as passive, but dynamic, and destructively so: witness the wording below from the Malaysian New Sunday Times on 16 January 2005.

'Crustal slabs float on a sea of molten rock. This churning sea moves the plates, tearing them apart. Volcanic gashes spew hot rock on the seafloor. The plates grind past one another. The cooling slab collides…and sinks... plunging back into hot earth… creating the volcanoes of Sumatra as well as thousands of earthquakes, including the magnitude 9.0 killer.

Such anthropomorphism is an effort to express the power Earth has just revealed. It is a power still very much in the public mind here. On the long weekend recently, no-one was going to the beach. It wasn't safe.

That article also spoke of acceptance and rebirth: historical records showed that tsunamis distribute rich sediments across the coastal plains, and so it would this time; a more fertile ecology will emerge in time. Life is reborn of such terrible events.

This final thought might be romanticised as Oriental wisdom but it is Western rationalism as well: the article had been picked up from the New York Times!

That acceptance will take longer on the shattered coasts than in our towns and cities that were untouched this time. But the world knows, as never before, the meaning of 'tsunami'.

Peter Purcell