Shorthand For Disaster

There has always been a shorthand for American disaster: Three Mile Island. Oklahoma City. Pearl Harbor.

Now the nation appears to be settling on "9-11" - pronounced "nine-eleven," not "nine-one-one" - for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

"9-11 is easy to say," English professor Wayne Glowka says. "It means the date, but it means a whole complex of things - how we think, how we act, how we feel. There's a whole 9-11 attitude."

Language experts say the term offers clues to how the country is coping with the disaster.

Placing a sort of slang on the destruction wrought by the hijackers is one way of putting the tragedy in perspective and moving on, says Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford University linguist.

"There's a need to package things, to label them, to get a handle on them," he says.

The disaster produced all sorts of options for historical reference - "the terrorist attacks," "September 11th," even "911," evoking the emergency phone number. But "9-11" appears to be sticking.

In a prime-time news conference just a month after the attacks, President Bush referred eight times to "September 11th." But earlier this month, he said: "Our economy was hurt by the attacks on 9-11."

The American Dialect Society, which monitors changes in the English language, declared "9-11" its word of the year for 2001.

"There's just no better way to refer to it. To call it 'the terrorist attacks' - that falls flat for some reason. It's too vague, I guess. There have been other terrorist attacks, but certainly none so memorable," says Glowka, a professor at Georgia College & State University who is also chairman of the society's new words committee.

The names used for disasters are often dictated by geography: Waco, Three Mile Island, Oklahoma City. But in the case of Sept. 11, "there's no place you can pin this to," Nunberg says. "If you just pick out the World Trade Center, that's not sufficient because it happened in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C."

Language experts say there is no way to trace exactly who is responsible for the term. Some point to the president, others to the teen-agers who often shape American slang. The cable news networks might have played a role, too. On the "crawls" that began appearing on TV screens after the attacks, "9/11" takes up precious little space.

Labels for landmark events have a way of taking on a broader meaning, says Carolyn Adger, director of language in society at the Center for Applied Linguistics. So "post-9-11" can refer to the war on terrorism, the anthrax letters, even the surge of patriotism that followed the attacks.

Glowka says he has even heard people accused of being "so Sept. 10."

"Sept. 10 means someone who's disconnected, living in La-La Land, someone who is naive and is still being superficial, self-absorbed," he says. "Sept. 11 has become such a signal date."

Teenagers are also using humorous references to 9-11 to cope with the tragedy.

The director of the Center at Georgetown for the Study of Violence says humor is a great way to help ease the pain of the attack. Alan Lipman says young people have always been able to link word events to their daily vernacular.

The Washington Post reports area teens are doing just that. Messy bedrooms are "ground zero." A mean teacher is "such a terrorist." When a student is disciplined -- it's "a total jihad." And out-of-style clothes -- "Is that a burqa?"

Some teachers worry the slang will offend some students. But students say the language helps them take some of the stress out of the attacks and isn't meant to hurt anyone.