NEW YORK — Every catastrophe begets its own linguistic fallout — words and phrases forged by the awful novelty of the moment or catapulted from obscurity into everyday speech. Sept. 11 is no exception: Its neologistic progeny have infiltrated the language of public discourse and private conversation. And now, in a few cases, they are headed into the dictionary.
When the American Dialect Society, a group of scholars who study American English, recently held its annual voting on the top new words of the previous year, they voted 9/11 the expression most likely to last. The nominees in various categories included weaponize, ground zero, theoterrorism, daisy cutter, facial profiling and debris surge, among quite a few others.
At Houghton Mifflin in Boston, the editors of the American Heritage College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, due out in April, recently went back in after their editorial deadline and added an entry for 9/11. They also added burka, Taliban, weaponize and hawala.
"It's so funny," said Steve Kleinedler, a senior editor for the dictionary. "No one asks about chad anymore."
Words enter the language or leap to prominence when there is something new to describe; they stick around if there is some continuing reason to describe it. Many fade quickly, their longevity directly proportional to the longevity of the phenomena they name. Catchiness helps. But some new terms are too clever to last.
"Shoeicide bomber, that's pretty awful," said Allan Metcalf, a professor of English at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and executive secretary of the American Dialect Society. He was citing a phrase, traced by some to Jay Leno, that the society voted most creative. "It is so in-your-face clever that I think it's probably gone even now."
In the category of most inspirational, the society voted unanimously for the immortal words of Todd Beamer, used to rally passengers against the hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93: "Let's roll."
Immediately after Sept. 11, words and expressions began piling up. Wayne Glowka, a professor of English at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville who edits a column on new words for the journal American Speech, was keeping track.
There were terms like ground zero, evildoers, al-Qaida and Taliban. Then there was post-Taliban and anti-Taliban and Sept. 10 "as an adjective meaning oblivious to danger or naive," Glowka said. He has also noticed the occasional use of bin added to a name for a kind of all-purpose demonization, not necessarily because the person in question was a supporter of al-Qaida. "When you listen to talk radio, people will call in and say, 'I don't like this Johnny bin Walker guy,"' he said, recalling a reference to John Walker Lindh.
In Hyde Park, N.Y., David K. Barnhart, editor and publisher of the Barnhart Dictionary Companion, a quarterly publication of new words, put together his own list of 2001 words in preparation for the dialect society's vote. In addition to terms like 9/11, he included anthrax anxiety, Goliath syndrome, religio-terror, shoe bomb, Talibanize and World Trade Center cough.