Back to names of disastrous events: Valentine’s Day Massacre, not 2-14.
That doesn’t count, Monty. That’s just borrowing from a pre-existing holiday’s name.
I prefer “Black Tuesday.”
Esprix
In El Salvador, people refer to the episode from 1933 where 30,000 were killed by the military as “La Matanza”, the Massacre.
How about “obfusciatrist’s birthday” instead of 9/11?
Either way, I don’t see why 9/11 is any better or worse than other names that develop for such things. It isn’t like there was a vote somewhere, this is just the name that was gravitated towards. My wife an I had a long discussion about this in the days after 9/11, wondering what the eventual nomenclature would be.
We then watched with interest in the following weeks as several candidates and euphemisms arose and slowly all fell away except 9/11.
But this doesn’t mean it is forever. It could be that in five years a movie or book will come along that changes our view of things and that movie or book will have a catchy title for the day and over time it will become the standard term. It could be that in 40 years, 9/11 will be viewed as the beginning of a much larger chain of events that will alter its meaning.
There’s no way that the terrorists could have planned something as big as the hijackings to go down on a specific day, at least not more than a little while in advance. The connection 9-11 happens to have with various other numbers we use is a coincidence because the date it happened was pretty much random within a certain range. All major projects have a projected window to come off, with dates given over to possible scrubs and delays. It’s simply not possible to plan complexly and accurately very far in advance.
if thats what you think, then the terrorists have won…
Yeah well. The Jews probably called it Nowember Naynter or something.
If we want a snazzy name, maybe we should find out what Osama’s calling it.
Actually, I heard on the radio back in December that GW wants to declare (or has already done so) September 11th “Patriot Day.” I’m politically nonaligned and will commit seppuku if this turns into a slam Dubya session, but personally think that’s a pretty shitty name.
Also, the proverbial “they” apparently ran into some trouble that forced them to move up the date of the attacks to September 11th. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they DIDN’T choose 9/11 once they made the change, but it wasn’t their original day of choice, at any rate.
Anyone have a 2002 calendar with the day marked? Mine doesn’t.
I call it “September 11”… “nine eleven” just sounds sort of cheesy to me. Not that “September 11” is much better, mind you.
I admit, I tend to think of it as “nine-one-one” rather than September 11 - for an absurd reason.
I’m Canadian, and a side-effect of that is that I can’t see the number 11 without thinking of Eugene Levy singing “Maudlin’s Eleven.”
Then I get down on myself for having something so horrific call something so trivial to mind. (It doesn’t help that the trigger is usually maudlin “tributes” like this one.)
After many years in the military, I tend to see “#/#” as “Day/Month.” Consequently, it took me a little time to look at “9/11” and see “September 11th” instead of “9th of November.”
What’s the usual convention for the Gregorian Calendar in the Arab world? And before anyone says it, Yes! I do know that Muslim countries use the Muslim Calendar; however, they also use the Gregorian for certain things.
Agreed, especially considering that there’s already a Patriot’s Day celebrated in Maine and Massachusetts.
Oh, geez, no. It’s a cool designation, but it’s SO overused. I have trouble keeping my Black Mondays apart from my Black Fridays. No need to add to the confusion.
Because “The day Al-Qaeda tried to kill my Mom” and “The day I helplessly watched while already deployed” just seem too long to get out. I consistently use either “That day in September”, “Our Day in September”, or my personal favorite: “The Day of Events” at my job. For some strange reason, people tend to feel just how connected I feel with the events, and just how resolved I am to kill every last one of those fuckers.
And I make it a point to indicate that those mother fuckers used civilian airliners and turned them into weapons of mass destruction to drive my point home.
Tripler
And I am going on another ‘business trip’. Guess where I hope to go. . .
Pearl Harbor is pretty comparable in terms of American deaths on a single day (although the battle of Antietam has them both easily beat). Yet no one says 12/7 or December 7. I think in time it will get changed to something else.
And I’m sure that while Sept 11 2002 will have tributes across the nation and media, in time it will eventually be reduced to a blurb about the president laying a wreath at a memorial as Pearl Harbor day seems to be marked anymore. How soon we forget…
IIRC, Dubya also suggested moving Flag Day.
I think 9-11 is vastly preferable to Patriot’s Day or The Day of Events.
It’s hard to think of a name that encompasses all the events of the day. “The Day of Stunned Mute Horror” sums it all up, but wouldn’t look good on a card or a memorial.
“Black Tuesday” doesn’t make it, because of the historical use of “Black ____day” as a name for stock-market crashes. IMHO, it would trivialize the events of September 11 to name the day in the fashion of the day in 1987 when the Dow dropped 500 points.
“Patriot Day?” Why, was flying planes into the WTC towers and the Pentagon an act of patriotism? Not for us, it wasn’t.
As Eve points out, applying a name that is WTC-specific leaves out the Pentagon and Flight 93.
I think we’ll have to settle for “September 11”, “9-11”, and so forth.
Actually, the most apporpriate name for 9/11 is Act 1. This is not the last, or even the most horrifying terrorist action, we’ll see in the US…