In the Marvel movies (all nine dozen of them), the characters will sometimes refer to the alien attack on Manhattan that took place at the end of 2012’s “The Avengers” by gravely calling the event, simply, “New York.” Scarlett Johansson explains to a magic, talking raccoon that Robert Downey Jr. is looking off into the middle distance because he’s traumatized by “New York” or something.

I find this irritating, partially because it just makes for syntactically awkward sentences to use the name of a place for the name of an event. Much more important, I dislike it because I am from Manhattan, and I remember when nonfictional death flew in from the sky. It didn’t change how we used our city’s name or cause us to define our home by that event. “New York” did not become a byword for the worst thing that has recently happened in New York.