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1. September 11

"Nine-Eleven” has become a shorthand reference to the shocking day when four hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center’s twin towers, into a side of the Pentagon and into a field in Pennsylvania—bringing to the U.S. numbing, outrageous examples of the terrorist mayhem that much of the world has experienced in the past. It was a nine-one-one call that shook America’s sense of security.

Prufrockian is a term that entered the vocabulary after the 1917 publication of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It refers to the outlook of an aging, inhibited man who is too afraid of life, of himself and of what people would say and too fastidious to dare, to act. His acting had to do with potential erotic encounters. He asked of his own unpursued ventures: “Do I dare disturb the universe?”