"Language is the archives of history."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
If Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Dialect Society have it correct, the Sept. 11 attacks brought a nation together in language as they did in spirit at the outset of a decade that was ultimately defined more by talk of technology than of terror.
Analysis of stories in 10 major U.S. newspapers since Sept. 11, 2001, shows an initial spike in the use of attack-related terms such as "terrorism" and "extremist," followed by a return to levels more reflective of the pre-9/11 world. The use of other words more tangentially related to the attacks — "Guantanamo" and "waterboarding," to name two — experienced similar rises years later.
But now, 10 years removed from the tragedies in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, the term "9/11" itself, pronounced "nine-eleven," may be the attacks' most lasting mark on the English language.
Geoff Nunberg is a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information and author of "The Years of Talking Dangerously," an analysis of words and phrases popularized during the George W. Bush administration. Nunberg recalls that as unity faded in the wake of the attacks, so did the nation's shared purpose, mutual experience and common language.
"It didn't really matter that we be together on that," Nunberg says. "It was different from World War II, where we really did have to be united. Everybody was in it together. To support the troops, you went out on Saturday and did scrap-metal drives.
"That wasn't really necessary this time. Four days later, they're arguing about American flag lapel pins."
Though the days and months and years after the attacks brought us "let's roll," "shock and awe" and "then the terrorists win," few such phrases have achieved lasting use. "Ground zero," "Patriot Act" and "axis of evil" are no longer fixtures of conversation.
"You have to distinguish between people talking more about certain subjects and people creating new words," Nunberg says, offering "blitz," "boondocks" and "brown nose" as just a few of the B-words that emerged from World War II. "There's this war (on terror) and we talk about it, but it doesn't become so much a part of our lives that we make it the model for other types of experience."
Lexicographer Grant Barrett, co-host of public radio's "A Way With Words" and a member of the American Dialect Society, sees the attacks' effect on language a little differently.
"They've left an impact like all major events in society leave an impact," Barrett says. "With this we have some lexical changes; '9/11' itself has entered the language. You have a lot more security concerns. Do you count the military language that has left those arenas? It's always about where you draw the line."
Barrett and Nunberg cited "9/11," a colloquial shorthand for the events that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, as the attacks' most enduring linguistic legacy.
"That didn't become the name right away, though," Nunberg points out. "'September 11' or 'Sept. 11' was used overwhelmingly by 20-to-1 over '9/11'; '9/11' doesn't really catch up until 2004, around the time (the war in) Iraq is going."
That said, the American Dialect Society chose "9/11" as its word of the year for 2001. And though "WMD" — weapons of mass destruction — took that honor in 2002, none of the society's words of the year since has even hinted at the attacks. Last year the American Dialect Society named "Google" as its word of the decade, a decade that opened with terrorism but without Facebook and Twitter and iPhones.
"Language is a payload for ideas in history," Barrett said. "It travels along with whatever happens, whatever the current zeitgeist is. It's not a catalyst, it's simply a passenger on these events."