Why does President Bush refer to 9/11 as "September the Eleventh"?

President Bush refers to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as "September the Eleventh". Others refer to the date/event as 9/11, and others say 9-1-1. I can easily imagine that, in the future, people will ask, "why do you dial 911 in an emergency?" The quick reply will be, "because America was attacked on 9/11, and that was an emergency ... so they decided to make the emergency number 9-1-1." That will make more sense than "I don't know". But I digress from my main question of why Mr. Bush says "September the Eleventh". "September Eleventh" is the correct way to say it, plus there is an antonymic dissonance with the "E" sound at the end of "the" and the start of "Eleventh". In fact, I think Mr. Bush says "September th' Eleventh", rather than coming to a full stop after "the" to correctly enunciate the phrase.

We say "July the Fourth", right? No, it's "the Fourth of July". We say "the Ides of March", or at least someone in Shakespere says it, but not "March the Ides", which just sounds funny. I know ... we say "Henry the Eighth", "King George the Third", and "Richard the Lionhearted". Wait ... those are people, not dates. Plus, some of them are also Shakespere characters, I think. I could be wrong. Hey, didn't Mr. Bush claim to have read "Three Shakesperes"? I wonder which one was "Shakespere the Third"?

OK. I think I've got it. We say, "Friday the Thirteenth". This is a day of terror and superstition, when anything could happen anytime to anyone. You can drop the line, "you know, today is Friday the Thirteenth," on someone, and they'll say "that's right ... no wonder that happened." Now, even though Friday is not a month, I think that the spirit of Friday the Thirteenth dwells in the President's invocation of September the Eleventh. It's a day of black acts, a day to beware of harm from otherwise innocuous quarters, a day to remain on edge until midnight strikes ... but even then it's still Friday the Thirteenth in another timezone, so are you really able to let your guard down?

The thing is, anyone can look at a calendar and see when Friday the Thirteenth is coming. The day doesn't really sneak up on you, unless you haven't done your homework. The same can be said about September the Eleventh. The Bush administration let it sneak up on them. They ignored the Presidential Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States". They ignored President Clinton's framework for dealing with terror, and convinced themselves that President Clinton used anti-terror policies as a way to distract from his personal scandals. They ignored reports that people were getting flight training, and didn't care about how to land the planes. Then, on September the Eleventh, they were shocked to find that freshly-fuled planes could be used as flying bombs. Didn't see that coming.

The terror attacks did not have to come on Friday the Thirteenth, because everyone knows that no black magic actually occurs on that day - it's just an Old Wives' Tale. No, the attacks came on a new day of fresh terror, produced by "evil-doers". It was a day that "no one could have anticipated", but is now a day where America will be on edge for the forseeable future: September the Eleventh.