Tom's Words

According to OUP's Words of the Year, 2008 will be remembered above all for "crunch" and "credit," although not necessarily in that order. The phrase was coined by the New York Times back in 1967, but only came into its own in these last headily disastrous few months: the BBC website deployed it almost 25,000 times in September. "Credit crunch" is a snappy alliteration, but it's also perfectly suited to the tenor of these times, in which financial reportage tends to be viscerally, bone-crunchingly concrete. Witness the free mixing of medical and mechanical metaphors that has seen equity "pumped" and "injected" into companies, interest rates "slashed," "fatal" blows delivered to banks, and economies left "reeling" from "toxic" shocks. The terms have been in use for a while—but rarely has a bloodless crisis been rendered so resoundingly physical.

All this, it's worth noting, is something of a historical anomaly. The great crash of 1929 was a fertile time linguistically, but also a more delicate one—at least in print. An Economist article that November coined the notion of a financial "recession," but intended it as a euphemism, reassuring gentle readers that "a revival in industrial activity" would not be long delayed. Similarly, the word "redundant" was first used in 1929 as a way of describing job losses without upsetting the public too much. Perhaps the most enduring fiscal euphemism of all, however, arrived in 1793: the use of "depression" in economics, which likened financial collapse to someone feeling a little glum. This was also the year in which George Washington noted in his state of the union address that "no pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt." If only someone had been listening.