WE SHOULD HEED THE LANGUAGE OF MEMORY.

Byline: Sally Ann Stewart

SO it's been five years since the perception of no justice meant there was no peace in the City of the Angels.

This anniversary isn't much different from the four previous ones. It means people are going to talk about and relive every terrifying second of those three days, when pent-up frustration in South Central Los Angeles exploded with so much force that 55 people lost their lives and thousands of business owners lost everything else.

There will be symposia where scholars and politicians debate whether inner-city residents have any more access to or belief in justice now than they did before a grainy video made Rodney King a living symbol of racial inequality. Talk-radio types will set up their microphones at Florence and Normandie. Everywhere else, Angelenos will swap stories about their scary drives home that night on freeways lighted by burning palm fires.

No need to listen to anyone's entire story, though, to figure out where any speaker is coming from or where they were 5 years ago. Listen only for what they call it. Was it a riot? A civil disturbance? Or the uprising?

In newsrooms, and in white neighborhoods in the Valley and on the Westside, it was a riot, a no-nonsense word that clearly describes something ugly without acknowledging injustice.

At some nonprofit community organizations, it was a civil disturbance, a phrase that doesn't convey the chaos or heartbreak or ashes left behind.

In South Central, those three days have come to be called the uprising, as though something worthwhile was won and injustice is no more.

When somebody who calls it the riot talks to somebody who refers to the same horror as the civil disturbance or the uprising, they're not speaking the same language. They don't understand each other's perspective or background or political ideology. The nanosecond somebody who calls it the uprising hears their conversational partner call it the riot, they know it's going to take a big bridge to cross that gulf.

The gap goes far beyond which words we choose, of course, because words aren't merely nonpartisan verbal tools, but rather, active expressions and precursors to our deepest feelings and beliefs.

Certainly it's democracy to have a difference of opinion, and nobody's suggesting a sort of Stepford-speak. Yet, if we don't understand the subtext of the words we choose, we'll never understand what anybody else is trying to say, either.

Those of us who live here and love this city - the way nuns drive convertibles, the way you can attend a posada and a Kwanza celebration on the same night, the way bosses let workers go home early on Academy Awards Day - thought that Los Angeles would grow back stronger after April 29, 1992, the same way a forest fire in the Angeles National Forest gives way to a fresh blanket of wildflowers. We thought that by now we'd talk about our differences and things would get better in paradise.

Five years later, after the divisions exposed by enduring O.J. has turned Los Angeles into the poster child of racism in America, it's clear that we still have to cut through so much smog until we can decide what it is we're talking about.