Its actual meaning in Japanese is "harbour-wave", and it was once so obscure that it regularly featured in quizzes.
Today it is the most famous Japanese word in the world, and children who could not tell you what hari-kiri or kamikaze mean now wake with the tsunami in their dreams.
Bangladesh - then East Pakistan - suffered a far worse catastrophe in 1970 than the St Stephen's Day disaster, but even though one million people perished, their fate never registered in the way that the Asian tsunami has done. But of course, there was then no global imagination as there is today. That imagination is the creation of technology. Holidaymakers can now capture on their hand-sized video cameras the last moments of people's lives on a beach in Thailand, to be seen the same day in Peru, Mongolia, Rwanda, Alaska.
The global village which Marshall McLuhan foresaw 40 years ago has now finally come to pass: indeed we have achieved an instantaneity of image, linking the remotest village in the Andes with sheep-herders in Anatolia, which even he never imagined. For in McLuhan's time most forecasters predicted that the future lay in space travel, not in a communications microtechnology which would bind almost the entire planet with electronic synapses.
Yet the idiotic 1960s space-travel heresy besets mankind even yet. The European Union has its farcical interplanetary vessel sniffing around the moons of Saturn, allegedly to find the origins of the universe; the US continues its imbecilic projects of exploring Mars and elsewhere in the solar system. Billions are squandered pursuing the uncatchable and trying to know the unknowable - while we inhabit a planet about which we understand so very little.
It is not irrelevant that most of the technology which enabled us all to witness the catastrophe of South East Asia is largely the product of private enterprise. The communications satellites, the video recorders, the mobile phones which came into their own in Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, were all created by market forces. These same forces also took the USAF Strategic Air Command communications network and turned it into the internet. On the other hand, it is governments - not people - that indulge in the utter folly of space exploration.
To be sure, no warning system could have prevented an Asian catastrophe of some kind last week: the nomadic habits of tectonic plates as are immune to human interference as are Saturn's moons. But would it not make more sense to have achieved more knowledge of the seas, and the strange habits of those continents angrily floating beneath them, than to be spending billions examining the worthless satellite of a remote planet 10 years' flying time away? After all, down here on earth, is some warning not better than none at all? Yet though this earth might be an electronic village, ancient rancours remain, as intact and inviolable as that unending argument which binds the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone. Israel was among the first to offer aid to the Pacific countries, as it did to Turkey, Rwanda and Macedonia during their travails. Sri Lanka accepted the material assistance, but refused to admit Israeli personnel, though it desperately needs experienced people - which decades of terrorism and war have given Israel. Even in calamity, the helping hand of Israelis is spurned.
Naturally, the first people to bring substantial assistance to the people of Indonesia were the Americans, who put a naval battle group off Java as soon as possible. But in a year's time, people across the world will complain about the failure of the country which did not fail - the US. The truth is that the main contributor to almost all relief programmes across the world is always the US, and the primary means by which aid reaches regions of catastrophe anywhere is invariably the American military. But the US never gets the credit for any of its acts of generosity, so numerous that, like heads of wheat in Kansas, they are invisible.
The political consequences of this Asian calamity might be huge. The disaster 24 years ago in East Pakistan led to insurrection and a two-week war between India and Pakistan. The outcome was the state of Bangladesh, which began life in the summer of 1971, an even more ravaged land than Indonesia is today. Yet the survivors of the vast floods which had utterly reshaped the contours of the greater Bay of Bengal have since rebuilt their country, as people unfailingly do after all adversity.
New societies emerged from the ruins of Berlin, Dresden and Hamburg, where the man-made holocausts of 1945 consumed entire families and neighbourhoods with the same ruthless impartiality of the seas in Asia last week.
Resilience is one of the defining characteristics of mankind: in calamity, we do not repine and die, but usually put aside our own woes and co-operate with even those we do not like for the greater good.
The fisherman of Java, his family and friends all dead, says he will never fish again; the similarly bereaved hotelier in Pattaya views the sodden swamp which was once his hotel and swears, it's over for good. Yet a morning will arrive when one, aware of the hunger all around him, reaches for a torn fragment of netting, suddenly covetous of all the fish in those long, untrawled seas. The other will see a fine piece of land alongside a beach, and declare that it's time to get the visitors back. Until that day, all we can do is to give until it hurts.