“Language failed this week,” wrote Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times as the dramatic first paragraph of her two-cents’ worth about the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It was itself an example of what she described, being a banality of the first order founded upon the childish assumption that language might do anything but “fail” under the circumstances. But, of course, she didn’t intend any such subtlety. The remark’s subtext was that her language, at least, would not fail. Like so many other eager wordsmiths, she felt up to the literary task of memorializing the event or she would not have written thus, and her first clever stroke was to be this insightful and original observation of language’s hitherto unrecognized inadequacies.

Yet she wrote truer than she knew. For those who expected of language no more than what it could provide, namely a gravity an ...

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