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If you think back just one year ago, you remember some of the changes we went through as a nation: This attack was an act of war, even crueler than Pearl Harbor because those who died were innocent civilians. We
found ourselves in a war against evil. Flags were flying everywhere, but not one plane was flying. The headlines screamed: “Why do they hate us?” Nobody wanted to go out. Comedians wouldn’t tell jokes. Saturday
Night Live producer Lorne Michaels publicly asked Rudi Giuliani for permission to tell a joke.
Because I am a writer, I started noticing how my language, American, was being used. I could say English, but our language is more correctly called American, not English. Here are some changes in the way we’ve been using American
since 9/11 and some words and phrases that will forever be linked to 9/11:
Connect the dots: In the 1970s, during the Watergate hearings, the operative phrase was, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Today, by analogy, the phrase is “Connect the dots.” Could we
have connected the dots and seen the plot that was about to unfold? We think of pieces of evidence as dots. We are haunted by dots. We must help our readers connect the dots—get to the meaning of what we write in fewer words.
Credit goes to Maria Smith of The WordSmith Group, my editor/proofreader (wordsmithgroup@aol.com) for suggesting this connection to the Watergate hearings.
Homeland: Until President Bush proposed the Office of Homeland Security, the word “homeland” was rarely used in America. There’s a reason: The German translation of the word, Vaterland, or fatherland, was
commonly used to describe the German nation. When Hitler came to power, his National Socialist agenda meshed perfectly with the Vaterland; thus, the word was expropriated by the Nazis. The word “homeland” was never used
to describe “stateside” during WWII. It was called “the home front,” but never homeland. After WWII, the term “homeland” fell out of favor in Germany, but it is mentioned in the lyrics of the German
national anthem. The source of this information is my good friend, Marion Schimmelpfennig, a copywriter and translator who lives just outside Bonn, Germany. (www.copywriting.de) She has recently started to see Vaterland used
again, riding on a new wave of patriotism, just as the English word homeland came into use. Although “homeland” has a tainted past, the Bush administration saw a warm, evocative and underused word and decided to dust if off
and make it respectable.
Axis of Evil: This is the phrase President Bush made famous in his State of the Union address early this year. It echoes the WWII phrase “Axis Powers,” used then to refer to Germany and Japan. It also makes the point
that this is a war against evil and terrorism, not against Islam. The problem I have with “Axis of Evil” and “Axis Powers” as phrases that vilify is that the world revolves on an axis. I would hate to give those
bad guys too much credit.
Ground Zero: This was a phrase that was in common usage before the September attacks and that has been forever changed. In fact, I recently heard the phrase used in a pre-9/11 recording to describe the Richardson (Texas) Telecom
Corridor as “ground zero” in the meltdown of the telecommunications industry, and it felt as eerie as walking down 19 flights of stairs. When the media named the WTC-site “ground zero,” that site became the
ultimate ground zero; we’ll never again use that term without invoking 9/11.
9/11: The very idea of the date standing for the entire event didn’t take hold for several weeks after … 9/11.
Weapons of Mass Destruction: This is scary language. A movie plays on a loop in my mind. Extreme close-up: A nozzle spraying a nameless atomized substance. Pull back to reveal the nozzle is part of a brightly painted crop duster
flying at low altitude over a city. Cut to a black-and-white 1950s scene of business people on the ground wearing tweed suits and hats taking cover from an “A-bomb” attack. You see? This is too scary to relate to directly.
After living through the anthrax and smallpox scares, it’s still too much to even imagine.
Jihad: The word is Islam for “struggle.” That is all it means. My good friend and neighbor, Talal Itani, says the world press and Zionists have unfairly expropriated the word and used it to mistranslate Quran
passages. Yet I would say that certain terrorist organizations have prompted that expropriation based on the way those organizations have used that word.
Emblematic and symbolic: We’ve seen these words used so often since the attacks of 9/11. As I said in an earlier EWA issue, I think we’re all looking for symbols or emblems that tell a story that is still too big and too
horrible for us to comprehend.
"Let's roll:" Those last words, spoken before the passengers of Flight 93 counterattacked, will forever live as a tribute to their heroism and all who died on that awful day. In my speech, I said, “How could anyone ever use
that expression again? It belongs to the heroes of Flight 93.” And then, in closing the Rotary Club meeting, the president said—“Let’s roll!”—as though to demonstrate, “This is how it’s
done.”
Yes, America has changed forever. And so has our language, American. So let’s roll! |
