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But “9/11”? It’s not even clear whether to call it a word. True, we had precedents for labeling an event with the month and the day: the Fourth of July for one, and December 7, 1941 (“a date that will live in infamy”), for another. Neither of those, however, is ever represented in numeral form, neither “7/4” nor “12/7.”

s it more than a trivial question to ask about the origin of “9/11”? I think so. Because “9/11” signals the change from experiencing those events right now to remembering them back then, the turning point, when we began to think of the attacks and their immediate aftermath not as part of the present but as something in the past. There is an opportunity for some historian to clarify exactly when and where the immediate experience of September 11, 2001, had receded enough to become an event to look back on.