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Date

Barack Obama in Concord

Candidate:

Obama

Event Type:

campaign rally

Town/City:

Concord

Event Start Date:

09/12/2008

Barack Obama holds a campaign rally, New Hampshire Technical Institute, 6 pm

Today on Word of Mouth, we’ll hear about the newest plans to honor the victims of 9/11 at the site of the World Trade Center in New York City. City planners unveiled the latest designs for a memorial and museum, and we’ll hear why some families of victims have concerns about the new 9/11 museum. We’ll also meet a New York knife-sharpener who remembers the city of the past. And we speak with a traveling poet who scours the planet for new words and lost languages.

(Photo by Brendan Loy)

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The Way We Will Speak

By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, September 11, 2008.

The print dictionary is dead. Or so says Michael Birch, the multi-millionaire founder of the social networking site Bebo.com. He’s announced the launch of his next business venture, an online video dictionary that resembles Wikipedia.

It’s called Wordia.com, and it’ll launch a week from today at the former home of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the author of the first "modern" English dictionary. Wordia.com will have traditional word definitions, but also professional and user-generated video content.

It comes at a time when the English language seems unusually volatile. New words come to us from hip-hop songs, from chat rooms and virtual worlds, from text messages, from non-native speakers combining English with their mother tongues.

To figure out just where our language is headed, we’re calling on Mark Abley. He’s a poet and journalist living in Montreal, and author of The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English. He joins us to explore how the world’s languages are transforming, and being transformed by, their speakers.

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Pasquale Spensieri, Grinder

By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, September 11, 2008.

When we talk about New York on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks, we talk about the future of the city - where it’s headed, and how it’s changed.

And change is a big part of the New York story. You don’t have to look far back to see the city’s past. The tone and the feel of New York – especially how it’s portrayed in TV and films – has shifted in recent decades. And no one knows this better than the people who have spent the better part of their lives there.

How We Remember 9/11

By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, September 11, 2008.

Today is September 11 - 9/11 - a date now connected in our collective memory to devastating attacks on a bright September morning seven years ago. This morning, members of victims families, survivors and student representatives read the names of 2,751 people killed in the World Trade Center attacks at the site where the Twin Towers once stood.

Solemn observances were held across the country, and ceremonies were also held in Shanksville, Penn., where United Flight 93 crashed. And at the Pentagon, where a memorial park with 184 benches and reflecting pools - one for each victim - was dedicated.

Seven years after Ground Zero became an informal monument and desitination for tourists, just how to re-build the site is mired in politics. Competing interests between the 19 public agencies, two private developers, 101 construction contracters and 33 designers, architects and consulting firms involved has made progress difficult.

Yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for a total redesign of a nearby transit hub and for disbanding the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, set up to coordinate reconstruction. Still, plans for a National September 11 Memorial and Museum were revealed on Tuesday. And last week, construction workers erected the first steel column of the 9/11 memorial on the site where the north tower once stood.

According to the latest design, two of the surviving trident arches from the original Twin Towers will be used for the atrium pavilion of the museum, and waterfalls will cascade into two reflecting pools. But while those designs are unveiled to the public, less clear will be how the museum will choose to represent the events of 9/11.

Graham Rayman is a staff writer at The Village Voice. When he was a reporter for Newsday, he covered the September 11th attacks beginning that day and continuing for the next two years. He wrote that there are really two schools of thought when it comes to what the 9/11 museum should include: those who want to commemorate the heroism, sacrifice, and bravery of the rescuers, and those who want to remember the missteps and errors involving emergency response, building evacuation, and faulty construction, and take a lesson from that day. He joins Word of Mouth from New York.

Read Graham Rayman's article about the 9/11 museum in The Village Voice

(USAF photo by Denise Gould)