from FOX News.

Sept. 11 Creates New Lexicon
Monday, September 11, 2006
By Michael Y. Park


Maybe you hear it when your co-workers mock the office manager, who's declared a “jihad” on the petty theft of office supplies. Or, it could be your grandmother, who's still at “Sept. 10” when it comes to accepting your divorce and pretty much still wears a “burqa” to the beach.

Though linguistics experts disagree on exactly how powerful an effect the attacks of Sept. 11 and the War on Terror had on American English, it's clear in everyday speech that the terrorist-driven tragedy and the years of conflict that have followed have added a long list of words to our language.

“It was a powerful event, and it had far-reaching consequences for our society afterward, like the changes in security and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” said John McCarthy, professor of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “These all had their further effects on the language, because it wasn't just one day, it was years, and it's still going on.”


The one phrase that nearly everyone agrees will be a permanent addition to the dictionary is the very term we use to refer to the 2001 terrorist attacks — 9/11, pronounced “nine-eleven,” along with its permutations, like “Sept. 11," post-9/11” and “pre-9/11."


It refers both to the actual date of the attacks, the attacks themselves, the concept of a world-changing event and a whole slew of other associated meanings, and was used as early as Sept. 12, 2001.

“It's an all-encompassing term, meaning all of the planes that were involved,” said Grant Barrett, a vice president of the American Dialect Society and editor of “The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English,” “The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang” and project editor of the “Historical Dictionary of American Slang.”

“It's such a vague shorthand and draws up emotions of anger, fear and uncertainty, a sense of vengeance, shame even. And yet if you need to define '9/11' you can briefly say 'the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,' but there's so much more there.”