At 1:25 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, ABC News correspondent John Miller was on the air, telling the news anchor Peter Jennings stories from police officers who were on the scene that morning when the World Trade Center was attacked. Miller told of an officer, blinded by dust and soot, being led by a “kid” to nearby St. Peter’s Church, where he washed his eyes out with holy water.

“These are the kind of human descriptions of the stories of people who were there at ground zero when the first building fell,” Miller said.

It’s no surprise that Miller, himself a former New York City deputy police commissioner, would have called the site of the devastation ground zero. After all, when the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, the location of the blast was commonly called ground zero as well. By that evening’s news broadcasts, the term was swiftly circulating as a way to refer to the area where disaster struck. For many, the generic description ground zero had become the name of a specific place, Ground Zero.

The unspeakable tragedy of that day had to be rendered somehow speakable, and linguistic shorthand made the process easier to bear. There was, of course, the shorthand of 9/11 as a label for the terrorist attacks, a numerical sequence turned into a powerfully evocative emblem. Ground zero, first used at the close of World War II for the detonation sites of atomic bombs, had become diluted to mean the focal point of any rapid change, or even just a synonym for “square one.” Writing in this space shortly after 9/11, Jan Freeman speculated that “the rubble of a real ground zero in New York may help to clarify that distinction for a generation or so.”