Zombielike, the assassin plunges through a nearly empty Madison Square Garden, site of the political convention, and climbs to a lighting booth high above the stage. Then he waits for hours until the candidate appears. He assembles his sniper's rifle. He aims.
This is a chilling scene from The Manchurian Candidate, the brilliant 1962 movie that, thinking about it, you realize had to have been made before 1963. Why? Security. There is none.
There is not a guard, gate or lock in sight, omissions that would have occurred to no one before President Kennedy's assassination. But to see the movie now is to be jarred into recognizing how much security has come to pervade our daily life -- and language.
That is evident from the multiplied use of existing terms like photo ID. What once seemed fussy is now produced routinely in every office lobby and airport gate. In March, the regular proprietor of this space explicated duct tape. Its multipurpose character has stretched since, with the government suggesting that in case of terrorist attack citizens use it with plastic sheeting. Lockdown, once confined to prisons, now also describes something for schools to do in case of terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, a glossary of new security terms has entered the language, reflecting how society has gradually accepted nuisance as the price of safety. The first stage came with the assassinations of the 1960s, which gave rise to a business called executive protection and security. Next came the waves of urban riots followed by soaring street crime, prompting a proliferation of Pinkertons, Wackenhuts and other rent-a-cops. The advent of electronic fraud and identity theft has brought the general term cybercrime. "Now, in the wake of 9/11," says Stephen Davis of the Davis Investigative Group in New York, "to do security you have to know about computers, heating, financial systems, business continuity -- just about everything."
Walking to lunch in New York recently, I spotted a long, long New York City fire department truck marked HAZMAT. A few years ago, passers-by would probably have asked the meaning of the acronym. Immediately after 9/11, having learned about hazardous material emergencies, they might have been alarmed. On this day, they just walked by, oblivious. How inured we've become to the vocabulary -- and reality -- of security.
The term sleeper cell used to be specifically scientific, referring to bacterial cells that communicate when chemically triggered. In June, the Justice Department won conviction in Detroit of two Arab immigrants who it said were part of a "sleeper operational combat cell" with designs on airports, military bases and landmarks like Disneyland.
(The word cell may be a prime candidate for Word of the Year. In his new book, Merchants of Immortality, Stephen S. Hall explains the controversy over stem cells. In his State of the Union address last year, President Bush called for cars powered by fuel cells. When a protester was detained by the New York Police, she shared with others a pocket device, giving added meaning to cellphone.)
A dirty bomb, made up of conventional explosives spiked with radioactive material, was at the heart of a terrorism training exercise in Seattle in May. The scenario called for a simulated detonation in an industrial section of town, causing 150 casualties. It would have had nowhere near the effect of a true nuclear weapon, like the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. But nuclear devastation is universally understood, and that makes the prospect even of a dirty bomb universally terrifying. Authorities are thus compelled to think about security not only against a tangible threat but also against a perceived threat.
Mass hysteria. That's the term once used to describe large numbers of people who developed symptoms of physical illness in response to an intense perceived danger. Mass sociogenic illness it is now called, and it worries a leading New York psychiatrist, Dr. Spencer Eth of St. Vincent's Hospital, who has treated hundreds of people suffering post-traumatic stress and other 9/11 afflictions. This phenomenon can arise for no obvious physical reason, or it can be magnified by real events, as during the Scud missile attacks on Israel during the first Gulf War. Among emergency-room patients, nearly half had physical symptoms or injuries. The other half suffered from panic and anxiety.
In the event of a dirty bomb, American emergency rooms could most likely handle the physical casualties. The question Eth wonders about is whether they could also respond to all those suffering from this affliction, different but no less real.
Another security, the kind denoted by the adjective "social," concerns an increasing number of Americans. One in eight Americans is now over 65; by 2030, it will be one in five. The consequences are obvious for doctor bills, drivers' licenses and drugstores. Can language keep up?
The vocabulary for age in America remains primitive -- same old same old, you might say. Some terms are repellently saccharine, like golden age and sunset years. Others are sour, like geezer and the acronym GOMER, flung at old people in some hospitals: Get out of my emergency room.
These pejoratives exemplify an attitude named by Dr. Robert Butler 35 years ago when he was the first director of the National Institute on Aging: ageism. The term has entered the language, as evidenced in July when Britain proposed to outlaw age discrimination in employment. "We must challenge the ageist assumption," an official said, "that younger employees make the best workers."
It is not hard to describe old people in neutral ways like seniors and older adults. There are not, however, enough other words to describe all the evolving subcategories of what has been labeled "The Age Boom." Some authorities speak clumsily of the young old, ages 65 to 75; the old old, 75 to 85; the oldest old, 85 to 99; and the centenarians. Likewise, older adults stay healthy longer than ever, but our vocabulary has not kept up with reality. Harry "Rick" Moody of the Brookdale Center on Aging at Hunter College in New York takes a clever stab at it when he distinguishes between the wellderly and the illderly.
There is a charm to terms like old old, a construction that linguists call reduplication, intensification by repetition. Even so, the growing need to describe so many people of so many ages cries out for coinages: new words for old.
Jack Rosenthal is president of The New York Times Co. Foundation. He has pinch-hit for William Safire, who is on vacation, for 22 years.
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