WOTY 9-11

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 03:08 PM 11/21/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>The thought that came to me was to check what British, Australian,
>South African, Indian, Caribbean, Hong Kong, and Canadian usage
>regarding 9-11 is.
>
>Regards,
>David
>

I have heard people here in NYC refer simply to "the Eleventh" -- no
qualification needed. E.g., "Since the Eleventh [such and so is the case]"
etc. I have also seen this a few times in writing, with the word actually
capitalized, in one or more of the local newspapers. I didn't take notes on
it when it occurred, but given the newspapers I tend to see the most this
would probably have been in either the NY Times, the NY Post, the Daily
News, or the Staten Island Advance.

One occurrence of "the Eleventh" that I recall was in a story where the term
was actually singled out and explained. It appeared on a Sunday, in the
Advance I think, though it could have been a wire-service story. The story
was about the new worklives of the surviving employees of Cantor Fitzgerald,
the bond firm that lost many hundreds of employees near the top of one of
the Towers, including the a friend of mine's oldest son, who had only been
working there a month.

So anyone interested in documentation or how common "the Eleventh" is or
isn't might want to try (beyond the usual WWW search engines) some of
searchable journalistic archives. I don't know if the term would have as
much currency beyond the NYC area, where the changes may have been somewhat
less pervasive.


Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at nyu.edu