Philadelphia Weekly

"The tragedy," "the Attack on America," "American heroes"--even the tiny and ubiquitous "9/11." Whether media- appointed or used by people you know, the language that describes last year's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is just a little too smug.

The way we talk about things largely reveals the way we think about them. In a very general way, this is known as semantics--the meaning created by the mechanics of sentence structure, grammar, word choice and so on.

There's a more specific language phenomenon known as "taboo avoidance," and it's something that happens in English often. Think "use the restroom," "he passed away" and "they slept together" and you've got the idea--it's a linguistic hiccup invented for polite company, but you might say it indicates an inability to accept certain parts of life on a deeper level.

In the movie based on Neil Simon's play Brighton Beach Memoirs, main character Eugene Jerome laughs at the way his older relatives whisper the name of any and all ailments. ("She got [hisses] cancer." "He has hemorrhoids.") It's silly and, you can bet, an ineffective way of staving off bad luck. But it does indicate a certain amount of respect for the forces of fate.

The language of taboo that's been everywhere for the last year has been identified as the dawning of a new era of sensitivity and sincerity. But like many things that get this title without earning it, it has more to do with appearing sensitive. The glossy phraseology and catchy subtitles on the nightly news are the prepackaged language of a made-for-TV movie, and they are deeply insincere.

If we learned anything last year, it's how vulnerable we are. When the language we use is precious or dismissive, it cheapens what happened. And what does that say about our ability to accept it and really grieve?

My own mother has said as much about the way she talked about losing her husband, my father, after a protracted illness. For months after his death, when the subject veered even remotely in the direction of husbands or families, she would find herself telling every last gory detail to an either sympathetic or mortified shopgirl.

Tossing off a polite "he passed away" just didn't seem to do justice to all that suffering. If she had to go through it, then by God, you had to listen to it.

As word people, the writers behind those news reports surely struggled with how to identify that day, how to encapsulate its events, how to be pithy without being glib. But their mistake was in thinking it was theirs to name and control.

The straightforward language in the breaking news stories on that day said it all. "PLANES DESTROY TRADE CENTER," CNN announced plainly. A CNN business story said: "U.S. dollar sinks against euro, yen after apparent terrorism." Apparent!

Remember how it felt to not understand, in a very real way, how two planes could veer so off-course on such a clear day?

The best way to honor what happened is to remember the language of shock and disbelief, of matter-of-fact horror and workaday sadness that characterizes the first minutes, hours and days of loss. We can't start packaging it as a thing of the past just yet. For many people, the suffering is far from over.

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Katie Haegele (khaegele@philadelphia weekly.com) wrote last week's cover story on author Robert Drake.