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.
___
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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