The first public words on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were produced the moment the events began to happen. Merely reporting bare facts broadcast live, they were stunned and sparse, “as if the media itself had gone into shock” (Houen, 2). Significantly, from the very beginning their relation to the reality of what was happening was problematic. At first it was just lack of information. At 8:46 a.m. the first plane hitting the North Tower of the WTC was described in exactly such terms: a plane hitting a skyscraper. For the next sixteen minutes, to the onlookers’ knowledge, nothing more sinister than a tragic accident was taking place. But then, after a pause “to give the world time to gather round its TV sets” (Amis, 4), the second plane hit the other tower and this excessive doubling of events dominoed an excess of information seemingly impossible to process.

However, already on September 11 the process of managing of the ensuing chaos began: the ordering vocabulary, first “attack” and then “war,” soon became the dominant words on terror, especially after “war on terror” was announced. After the initial stutter, the public language became more fluent, rigorous, as if it could reverse or at least replace what the “big picture” “spelled out”: “If one were to slow down a videotape of the first plane approaching then hitting the north tower (…) and then zoom in to the instants of impact, one would see the word ‘American’ slide, letter by letter, into oblivion” (Smith); one would also see “the violent obliteration of the word ‘UNITED’” (ibid.).