Mind your language
MY husband spent a suspiciously long time in front of the television pictures of the World Trade Center disaster. I do not say he is utterly without feeling, but I sometimes wonder whether a medical training makes doctors more or less sympathetic.
Once the destruction was over we were left with the aftermath. What do people think an aftermath is literally? Something bloody, perhaps, like a massacre. The fact is that it never is used literally; it is a mummified metaphor.
An aftermath is what you get after a mowing, or math. No one ever calls the mowing down of victims a math, but they might profitably do so. Math itself was used in English before the Conquest. The professional philologists tell us that the modern form of the word would be rneath, like the Irish county, had it not so often been used in an unstressed form as part of compounds such as daymath (the area of hay a man can mow in a day, that is, an acre, although I am not sure whether this acre ought to be the same size as the acre which a man can plough in a day), or ?aftermath (which meant the second mowing from a field; the foenum cordum of the Romans).
So aftermath has the same meaning as lattermath: the grass that springs up after the hay is cut, and which can be harvested itself, though some say it is not so wholesome. I have no knowledge on that question. It does strike me, though, that, since it refers to things that grow up green after a mowing, it is an unapt metaphor for the ruins of a terrorist attack.
As for the terrorists themselves, they belong to a category that has been with us for little more than two centuries. Though terror is an old enough word, the 'reign of terror' imposed by terrorists running a system of terrorism dates only from the French Revolution, specifically from the years 1793 and 1794 when the Red Terror was in force. Ivan was terrible and Genghis Khan terrifying, but it is from the French Revolutionaries that Lenin, Stalin, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden have harvested their aftermath of terrorism.
Dot Wordsworth
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