Introducing English Linguistics

9/11: A case study in word formation.
The word 9/11 not only dates the
attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in
Washington, DC on September 11, 2001 but has come to symbolize an event
that ushered in an entirely new threat: global terrorism. The word is
uniquely American because in the US, numerical representations of dates
have the order month/day/year (9/11/2001). Outside the US, the order is
day/month/year (11/9/2001). Because the word dates the event it describes,
it is easy to find citations containing very early uses of the word, and to
view the processes at work that gave rise to the word. Meyer (2003) lists
examples of 9/11 in newspapers occurring as early as September 12, 2001:
You want a defining national moment for your lifetime? No? You don’t
have a choice in the matter. If Dec. 7, 1941, lives in infamy, then Tuesday
is going to endure as the day that evil ambushed America. Sept. 11, 2001.
The ninth month and 11th day. 9–11. 9-1-1. Apocalypse. Now. 
(The Times Union, September 12, 2001)
Headline: “America’s Emergency Line: 9/11” 
(NY Times, September 12, 2001)
America opens at 9, which is to say 9-ish, which has become our sad-
dest hour. 9:02, for example. Or 8:45, or 9:04. Or 9:11, six minutes after
the second jet hit the second tower, and the mind started connecting
dots in a panic. At some point we may have stopped to consider the
date, 9/11, which reads as 9–1-1, which is keypad-speak for: Oh God no,
help, please. 
(Washington Post, September 13, 2001)
Shoreline resident Michael Rush carries a personal memorial to the vic-
tims of Tuesday’s terrorist attacks on his walk yesterday from Shoreline
to Seattle Center along Highway 99. On his flag, the twin towers of the
World Trade Center stand in for the “11” in “9-11,” the date of the
tragedy and the call for emergency help.
(Seattle Times, September 15, 2001)
In each of the examples, there is a level of iconicity in the word: the date
9/11 is identical with the telephone number 911, which is an emergency
telephone number in all regions of the US. In addition, the two number
1s are symbolic of the two towers of the World Trade Center.
At this level, 9/11 is similar to memory in that it results from extending
the meaning of the date on which the attacks occurred as a way of describ-
ing the event itself. Meaning extension is a very common process in
English, and often the new word is a metaphor of the word on which it is
English words: Structure and meaning
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based. For instance, just about every part of the human body has become a
metaphor:
the head of an organization
the heart of the problem
at arm’s length
the foot of the mountain
won by a nose
I’m all ears
But meaning extension is not restricted to creating a metaphor based on
an existing word: just about any word, if it is around long enough, will
have its meaning extended at some time during its life. For instance, the
OED lists many meanings for the word family. One of the more common
meanings centers on the notion of a group of people who are related and
who live together. Citations illustrating this meaning date back to 1667.
However, this meaning of family has been extended to designate a group of
people engaged in organized crime. Thus, family  in  the Gambino family
refers not to parents, children, and other relatives having the surname
Gambino but rather to a group of people involved in organized crime head-
ed by individuals with this surname. The earliest citation of this meaning
in the OED is 1954.
But while the iconic appeal of 9/11 may be one reason for its existence,
there are other reasons too. National disasters in the US have typically
been named after the locations in which they occurred: Pearl Harbor,
Oklahoma City, Three Mile Island. Creating new words from proper nouns has
precedent in English: Marxism (Karl Marx), quixotic (Don Quixote), sadism
(Marquis de Sade), sandwich (Earl of Sandwich), boycott (Charles Boycott).
These words will vary in the extent to which speakers will recognize them
as having their origins in proper nouns. Because Marxism is capitalized, it
will be more easily recognized as a proper noun than boycott, a word based
on Charles Boycott’s surname. During his tenure as a land agent in Ireland
in the nineteenth century, the British-born Charles Boycott was subjected
to a rebellion by his tenants over his unfair treatment of them. But nam-
ing the attacks that occurred on September 11 after the locations in which
they occurred was not possible, “because the events of the day happened
in several different places – giving the date is more compact than saying
‘The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and in
a plane over Pennsylvania’” (Nunberg 2004: 156).
Initially,  9/11 competed with September 11 as the official word for the
attacks, but in current usage, 9/11 is the preferred term. Will 9/11 survive
as a viable word in English well beyond the current time, or will it suffer
the fate of Bushlips (‘insincere political rhetoric’), a word that was selected
as word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 1990 (www.
americandialect.org/index.php/amerdial/1990_words_of_the_year,
accessed April 5, 2008) and that has no current relevancy? Given the
importance of the events that 9/11 describes, it stands a very good chance
of becoming a permanent addition to the lexicon of English.
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