‘Event' Was the Day's Word of Choice

Judging by the choice language deployed by Governor Spitzer, August 8 may have been the most "eventful" day in history.

For the governor and the leaders of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, "event" was the word of the day, a harmless little noun that usually refers to fun things like baseball games or concerts but came in handy to describe the wreckage and commuter chaos caused by yesterday's torrential downpour and tornado.

According to the governor, who briefed reporters at an afternoon Manhattan press conference, New York City experienced an "unusual meteorological event" that was wrongly "presumed to be a once-in-a decade event."

The event actually was composed of "three different events." Mr. Spitzer helpfully recounted the "sequences of events." First, there was the 3 inches of rainfall. Then came the tornado in Brooklyn, which the governor said was a "localized event." Finally, the "third event is a heat event," the governor said.

The executive director of the MTA, Elliot Sander, was just as descriptive. "We were faced with an unusual and unfortunate confluence of events this morning," he said. "The magnitude was greater than what we had seen in the last two events," he added, referring to other damaging rainstorms this year.

The second edition of Webster's unabridged New International Dictionary lists several definitions of the word. It can mean "occurrence," "the consequence of anything," "any one of the contests in a series or program, "that which comes, arrives, or happens," or "any incident, especially a noteworthy one." The word also applies to Einstein's theory of relativity, which says all physical measurements can be reduced to observations of relations between events.

A senior vice president of New York City Transit, Michael Lombardi, summed it all up:

"This was an unexpected event," he said.