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By Geoffrey Nunberg
Los Angeles Times - September 16, 2001
Geoffrey Nunberg is a Stanford linguist and usage editor of The American Heritage Dictionary.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Twice during the last few days I listened on TV as witnesses to the
World Trade Center calamity broke down, unable to continue their accounts. On both
occasions the interviewers waited for a moment of awkward silence, then finished the sentences.
We feel conflicting urges at a moment like this. On the one hand, we hold that there are
times when words ought to fail us, that there are things so horrible that silence is the
only language for them. "Indescribable," "unutterable," "unspeakable"-—those were the
words that kept coming to mind as we struggled to comprehend what had happened.
But we share those reporters' discomfort with dead air, too. It may be that language can't
do justice to the horror of experience, but it's the only game in town. So we all sat rapt
as the networks kept running the same awful video clips under a babble of wan
descriptions—-"shocking," "horrific," "terrible," "like a battlefield." As if the
repetition would eventually render the reality as familiar and banal as the language
itself.
Language seemed to fail us, too, as a vehicle for expressing our sense of outrage.
The popular press had it relatively easy—-the San Francisco Examiner's front page the
day after the attack showed a color picture of the World Trade Center explosion under
the one-word screamer "Bastards!", which, after all, is something we all needed to get
off out chests.
But that approach wasn't an option for those to whom the public was looking for a
more considered judgment. The official condemnations sounded oddly stilted. Both Gov.
Gray Davis and New York Sen. Charles Schumer called the attacks "dastardly," a word that
tends to bring to mind a mustachioed Gilbert and Sullivan villain, not a crazed zealot.
It occurred to me that they might have seized on the word because of its sound
associations, but in that case I preferred the Examiner's version.
But other officials took the same anachronistic tone. President Bush called the
attacks "despicable," which has a primly Victorian sound to it. A TV commentator described
the acts as "nefarious," another Gilbert and Sullivan word. And numerous people used the
word infamy, which already sounded old-fashioned when President Franklin D. Roosevelt
used it in describing the Pearl Harbor attack back in 1941.
You could hear that Victorian note, as well, in the condemnations of the hijackers as
"craven" and as "faceless cowards," as if the most damning thing you could say about them
is that they behaved dishonorably. Surprise attacks on unarmed civilians are repugnant by
any moral standard. But "cowardly" doesn't explain that suicidal fanaticism—indeed we
might wish that some of the hijackers had chosen to chicken out when the time came to
throw their lives away.
It was all strikingly different from the language we use to condemn other sorts of
murderous outrages. The unabomber was demented and the Columbine killings were "senseless";
nobody would have thought of describing either as "infamous" or "dastardly."
True, everyday words might seem insufficient to describe an experience of this
magnitude, at least for people and publications who are speaking for the historical
record. Even "tragedy" felt too slight, vitiated by years of tabloid overexposure.
But the contemporary language hasn't wholly lost its moral bearings. We still have
resources that are up to rendering the enormity of the attacks, as well as words can
ever hope to do: "ghastly," "monstrous," or "enormity" itself.
In the wake of the attacks, though, official America needed something else: language
that would reassert control of a world that had gotten terrifyingly out of hand. A high
Victorian indignation serves that purpose well. It evokes the moral certainties of a
simpler age, when the line between civilization and barbarism was clearly drawn, and
powerful nations brooked neither insult nor injury from lesser breeds without the law.
This may be the first war of the 21st century, as President Bush has said. But its
rhetoric will be taken from the 19th.
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Geoffrey Nunberg is a Stanford linguist and usage editor of The American
Heritage Dictionary. His collection "The Way We Talk Now" will be published next
month by Houghton Mifflin.
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