The Enigma of 9/11

Wi The Enigma of 9/11 Allan Metcalf MacMurray College Tas there ever such a strange coinage as 9/111 That term spontaneously became the designation for the airplane hijackings and terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, shortly after the events themselves. For its prominence in the national discourse, 9/11 was the unquestioned choice of the American Dialect Society as its Word of the Year for 2001 . For its anomalous form, it also drew my attention as I was finishing the manuscript of Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success (Metcalf 2002) . I had deduced five "fudge factors" which I still believe to be the ones that determine whether a new word is likely to become a permanent addition to the vocabulary: • Frequency of use. • Unobtrusiveness. • Diversity of users and situations. • Generation of other forms and meanings. • Endurance of the concept. Of these five, the most counter-intuitive and also, I think, most important , is Unobtrusiveness. A new word or expression succeeds if it is a "stealth word," flying under the radar that detects neologisms, seeming as if it has been with us all along. That is why most conscious coinages fail: they are clever, witty, obtrusive. We laugh at them, but we do not find ourselves using them. 9/11 was obtrusive, but not so clever or witty. The events it designates were far too grim to evoke the usual playfulness and exhibitionism among would-be neologists. True, there is a hint of cleverness in the coincidence that 911 is the telephone number for an emergency, but Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Sodety ofNorth America 28 (2007), 160-162 The Enigma of 9/11161 that is pronounced "nine-one-one," while 9/11 is always, of course, "nine-eleven." 9/11's obtrusiveness is more basic. It comes from its failure to follow any familiar pattern of coinage. No previous major event had a month/day designation in that form. What is the usual pattern for naming a major event? Most often the event will be evoked by the name of the place, as in Yorktown, Waterloo , Gettysburg, PearlHarbor, or Littk BigHorn for battles, Oklahoma City for a terror attack, or Woodstock for the counter-culture festival of the late 1960s. That pattern would not work for the events of September 11, 2001, not only because there were several locations (World Trade Center in New York City, Pentagon in Washington, D.C, and the Pennsylvania countryside, plus the airplanes) but because those locations were too much in the news. LittkBigHorn, for most of us, can mean only 'Custer's last stand,' because so little else happened there, but a reference to New York City or the Pentagon could mean many other things.1 A second way of naming an event is to indicate what happened: Passover, Palm Sunday, Independence Day, Armistice Day, Washington's Birthday . Not only are these different in form from 9/11, but they also are days officially commemorated annually, while 9/11, at least so far, is not. Some designations combine happening with place, as in the Defenestration ofPrague or Lincoln's GettysburgAddress. A third way to designate an event, closer in form to 9/11, is to use the month and date: the Fourth ofJuly, for example, or December 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy," as President Franklin Roosevelt once proclaimed. There is Cinco deMayo, commemorating the Mexican defeat of the Spanish in 1862, and Juneteenth, recalling the 19th day ofJune, 1865, when the Emancipation Proclamation was read to African Americans in Galveston, Texas. But then there is 9/11. No major event ever had such a numerical designation. And yet, we use the month/date numerals all the time in memos and conversations. It was a stretch to adopt this designation for a major event, all by itselfwithout explanation or qualification, but it was still familiar. For that matter, we had recently become familiar with 'Editor's note: this observation brings up the complex discussion of the logical denotation of proper nouns as names vs. that of common nouns as property sets. It appears that with these neologisms, the proper nouns can...