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Coverage of Terrorism
Language Matters as We Try to Describe
What Happened
‘By accepting language’s failure, we surrender our understanding
and the complex meaning of events to silence….’
By Beverly Wall
Virtually everyone agrees that on
September 11 something significant
happened, and its reverberations
are felt by citizens and journalists
alike. Yet for those whose job it
is to report news of this event it has
been difficult to name this “something”
and figure out how to talk about the
events of that day and their aftermath.
This dilemma of language persists despite
the immense visibility, dramatic
scale, and far-reaching dimensions of
the events and despite the flood of
words generated in print, online and
on the air.
The notion that what happened is
“beyond words” has become, in fact,
the dominant theme in the news and
public commentary. Words like “indescribable,”
“inexpressible,” “unspeakable,”
“inexplicable” and “unimaginable”
are employed when more precise,
descriptive words seem inadequate to
the task. A headline on a column by
Ellen Goodman reads: “At Times Like
This, Words Fail.” At “The Days After,”
a Web site created by the University of
Chicago Press, the homepage begins,
“At the moment of catastrophe we fall
silent. Language fails.” On television, a
young San Francisco artist, who is trying
to create a work of art to capture
the emotion of the experience, says
that September 11 lies “out of the
reaches of grammar.” Even Nobel laureate
Toni Morrison expresses this
theme in a eulogy appearing in a special
edition of Vanity Fair: “To speak to
you, the dead of September…I must be
steady and I must be clear, knowing all
the time that I have nothing to say—no
words stronger than the steel that
pressed you into itself; no scripture
older or more elegant than the ancient
atoms you have become.”
This theme exposes a very natural
reaction in the short term. But, in the
long term, it can become a dangerous
assumption. By accepting language’s
failure, we surrender our understanding
and the complex meaning of events
to silence or, perhaps worse, to the
ready-made, sometimes muddled,
sometimes manipulative words of others.
James Baldwin writes, “People
evolve a language in order to describe
and thus control their circumstances,
or in order not to be submerged by a
reality that they cannot articulate. (And
if they cannot articulate it, they are
submerged.)”
We must find ways to articulate this
experience, both as individuals and as
a society. Not to do this is to miss the
full meaning of what happened and is
happening now. Or, if we fail to name
what we have experienced, we might
be overwhelmed by the sheer terror
and horror of the wordless visual images
of towers collapsing and people
holding hands as they jump from windows.
It is hard work to get the words
right, but we should not be willing to
settle for the language of cheap sentiment
or agenda-laden ideologies.
Language always matters. Words signal
more than their simple dictionary
denotations; key terms and metaphors
help us to construct a framework of
connotations, historical associations,
and cultural implications, as well as
offer us guidance in connecting concepts
and generating actions. Take, for
example, “Ground Zero,” the phrase
used to designate the site of the destroyed
World Trade Center. This term
is rooted in the first uses of atomic
weapons in the mid-1940’s and refers
to the point of detonation of a nuclear
explosion or the point of impact of a
missile. This term doesn’t accurately
convey what happened, although it
might reflect our horrified sense of the
devastating results—a degree of destruction
and mass dissolution to match
our worst 20th century nightmares of
nuclear war. At other times, this site is
also referred to as “The Zone” and
“The Ruins.” Zones suggest war zones,
of course, and ruins are associated with
the disconcerting notion of societies in
decay or cultures in decline. Do these
words tell us the story that we believe
we are experiencing?
Other examples can be found in the
confused clusters of words related to
“war,” “crime” and “terrorism.” Are the
events of September 11 described best
as acts of war? Or are they crimes, as
Hendrik Hertzberg has argued in The
New Yorker? Perhaps they are crimes
against humanity, as others suggest.
Whether acts of war or crimes, are the
people who committed these acts best
called “terrorists?” Or do we agree with
Reuters—which cautioned its correspondents
against indiscriminate use
of this loaded word—that “one man’s
terrorist is another man’s freedom
fighter?”
In his address to a joint session of
Congress on September 20, President
George W. Bush variously referred to
these men as “terrorists,” “our enemies,”
“enemies of freedom,” and
“murderers.” In a key opening sentence,
Bush cast the dilemma this way:
“Whether we bring our enemies to
justice, or bring justice to our enemies,
justice will be done.” This demonstrates
the neatly turned phrase that
speechwriters love; a classical rhetorician
would call it “antimetabole,” or an
artful repetition of words in reverse
grammatical order.
10 Nieman Reports / Winter 2001