How We Talk When We Talk About January 6

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With House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s recent release of security footage to Fox News, the events of January 6, 2021 are making headlines once again. But how should we refer to what took place at the U.S. Capitol on that day?

Everyone agrees on the place and the date, but on little else. To call it an attempted coup, an insurrection, or the storming of the Capitol is to consciously adopt a point of view that assigns it an antidemocratic narrative, one rejected by many conservatives.

At the other extreme, referring to January 6 as a “normal tourist visit,” as Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde did four months after the fact, is to ignore the motivations of those involved, as well as the violence and loss of life that occurred.

As a result, many pundits simply refer to it as a riot or a demonstration. These more generic terms, however, make few people happy. The political left views such labels as a whitewashing of the motivations of those involved. On the other hand, some supporters of former president Trump believe that January 6 was an Antifa- or FBI-led 'false flag" operation and reject such labels for it on that basis.

Once the House Select Committee’s investigation became popularly known as the January 6th Committee, however, other descriptors gradually dropped away, and a reference to the date effectively became the default—and nonpartisan—label for it.

It can take a while for a society to decide how to refer to an event. “Pearl Harbor” became the name for the attack by Imperial Japan on the U.S. naval base at Oahu in 1941. But it could just as easily have become known as “December 7,” especially since that is how President Roosevelt referred to it in his "Day of Infamy" speech given a few hours later. In that instance, the location of the event became the shorthand way of referring to it.

“D-day” was originally a term that referred to the first day of any military operation. For most, however, it now refers exclusively to the Allied landings at Normandy during World War II. And Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom slowly morphed into "the Gulf War" and "the Iraq War" as those events outgrew their initial military monikers.

In other cases, an event is simply too diffuse or complex to be invoked by anything other than the date on which it took place. The horrific events of September 11, 2001, which unfolded over several hours in Lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, have become universally known simply as 9/11.

A similar dynamic was at play during the 19th century, as people struggled with how to characterize the military conflict that raged from 1861 to 1865. In the North, it was frequently referred to as the War of the Rebellion. This term was used, for example, in the title of the official U.S. history of the conflict. The preferred term in the South, after the cessation of hostilities, was the War Between the States.

It was only in the 20th century that the term “civil war” was accepted on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. But even then, some segregationists made use of the phrase “War of Northern Aggression” instead.

How much does nomenclature really matter? Research by psychologists and linguists suggests it matters a great deal. The mental labels that we assign to a thing or an event, and the words that we use to refer to it, can have subtle but significant effects on perception and later memory.

Language may or may not determine thought, but many studies have demonstrated the pervasive effects of labeling. The names that we assign to things inevitably reflect and color what we believe and how we think about them.

In a now-classic study by psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer, participants in a memory experiment were shown a film of an automobile accident and then asked to estimate the speed of the vehicles involved. Participants who were asked about the episode in terms that implied a higher rate of speed, such as “smashed,” provided higher estimates than participants whose questions implied a lower speed, such as “contacted.”

A week later, study participants who had been in the “smashed” condition were more likely to mistakenly report that broken glass had been present at the scene. Since Loftus and Palmer published their results, a host of studies have found similar effects. The results are clear: The words that we employ when we reflect on event can alter our perceptions of it.

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And as with January 6, many of the names we use to refer to things have clear political overtones. For example, referring to the South Atlantic archipelago as the Islas Malvinas instead of the Falkland Islands is a partisan act and not simply a question of geographic nomenclature. The same is true for dozens of other territorial disputes around the world.

But names can and do change, even long after the fact. The Soviet Union referred to World War II as The Great Patriotic War to motivate its citizenry and to honor the sacrifices of the millions slaughtered during the conflict. But in 2015, 70 years after the cessation of hostilities, the Ukrainian parliament adopted the term “Second World War” as a replacement for the term used by the Soviets.

The second anniversary of the events in Washington has come and gone, and we seem no closer to an agreed-upon understanding of what happened or why. As a result, the events of that day will probably always be known simply as January 6—a generic placeholder that reflects our inability to bridge the political chasm that divides us.