Way over there at The Christian Century, Rodney Clapp asks why what took place on 9/11 has no name but is referred to by a simple date - which isn't standard practice in designating momentous events. He speculates that 'it may be that 9/11 caught on because 911 is the emergency phone number - the digits to be dialed in case of extreme crisis'. Me, I thought that was the reason, but in any case Clapp is in two minds about the effect of 9/11 having no (real) name. On the one hand:
[S]urely it's better that we adopt no name for it than adopt a specious and misleading name. To come up with a name that suggests the attack was a case of Islam versus Christianity, or Islam versus the West, would be a destructive act of misnaming.
But on the other hand:
Failing to substantially name what happened on 9/11 also helps underwrite the open-endedness of America's war on terrorism. The 9/11 event becomes a blank check for that war, a war that lacks a specific goal.
There you go: had 9/11 been called The Attacks on Manhattan and Washington DC, history might have been all different. Is this linguistic determinism?