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THE WORD Talking through the terror By Jan Freeman, Globe Staff, 9/16/2001 Language failed this week, one commentator wrote, and echoes of that sentiment were everywhere in the aftermath of Tuesday's terrorist strikes. But the rhetorical expressions of inadequacy were, paradoxically, their own disproofs; we did not, in fact, stand dumbstruck, even in the face of what we called unspeakable. All around us, on the streets and in the media and on the Internet, varieties of rhetoric were being tried on for size, as everyone searched for the words that would do justice to grief and rage without betraying our rational selves. National leaders, forced to stand and pontificate, may have had the toughest job. It's not easy to sound like Churchill or Roosevelt or Shakespeare's Henry V when the enemy we're facing down is not a nation but a tactic, the one we try to pin down with the word terrorism. And loud denunciation after the fact - after a fact like this one - risks sounding ineffectual, like the hollow slam of the barn door when the horse is already long gone. In the early going, President Bush fell back several times on one of his favorite phrases, ''make no mistake.'' But addressed, as it was, to fellow citizens - not to the enemy - its make-my-day, read-my-lips sternness seemed slightly off course. The prospect of ''whipping terrorism,'' at least to ears old enough to remember the Ford administration's motto, ''Whip inflation now'' (WIN, for short), sounded a bit glib, more suited to the sports pages than to the start of what we're calling war. It wasn't till Friday's speech at the National Cathedral that the president found himself in possession of a presidential-quality text, the jingle of spurs replaced by somber, if still speculative, parallelisms: ''It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.'' Maybe similar help is on the way for Georgia Senator Zell Miller, who wants to ''bomb the hell out of Afghanistan,'' a country that's already bombed itself back into the Stone Age. (Well, not quite. Stone Age existence would look like unthinkable freedom to an Afghan woman under Taliban rule.) Journalists, meanwhile, discovered that some powerful words, after years of lounging around in civvies, had gotten back into uniform for the occasion. Enormity was once again used to mean ''a monstrous offense or evil,'' despite its widespread adoption as a synonym for hugeness. Ground zero, the spot where a bomb detonates, had just about become synonymous with square one, the starting point; the rubble of a real ground zero in New York may help to clarify that distinction for a generation or so. And terrorism was real again. A reader had recently argued that the word should not be used for acts of sabotage that did no harm to people, as in a recent story on ''eco-terrorism.'' Rather than dilute terrorism for political purposes, he said, we should stick with militant for such illegal protests. Our loose usage, it seems, was a luxury of peacetime; now we need those hard definitions back. (One exception, apparently, will be the redundant but phonologically irresistible safe haven. Several commentators made an effort to escape it, talking instead about countries that offer ''safe harbor'' to terrorists. But the noun harbor, I suspect, is too freighted with coastal connotations to sound appropriate when we're talking about mountains and underground bunkers.) As for the talk on the streets, it was direct and often eloquent; for once we weren't talking about ''closure.'' Most astonishing, though, was the word that wasn't there, among the young New Yorkers in front of the microphones: The ubiquitous like of youthspeak had all but evaporated. The same thing happened, according to linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, after a shooting rampage last March at Santana High School in Southern California. The word like, so often used to communicate irony or tentativeness, to separate speakers from their words, was nowhere to be heard among the students, Nunberg said in a radio report. ''Faced with talking about the school shootings, they had no use for like and the distance it would have interposed between them and their words,'' he said. ''They know as well as anybody that there are times when you have to throw yourself back on narrative to make sense of things.'' E-mail [email protected]. For a month's worth of The Word, go to boston.com/globe/columns/freeman. This story ran on page D8 of the Boston Globe on 9/16/2001. © Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.