Credit crunch will go down in history, and dictionary
Contributors are not employed, compensated or governed by TD, opinions and statements are from the contributor directly
By Mark Elliott
The size, impact and historical significance of an event can usually be measured not only by its impact on our lives, but by its effect on our language. These cataclysmic global shifts have a habit of embedding themselves into our every day diction, redefining words or creating completely new ones.
Take the war in Iraq; the terms ‘smoking gun’ and ‘WMD’ have become synonymous with the policy failure. Watergate used to be simply the name of a hotel in Washington DC; but since a certain Mr Nixon decided to check-in, the word has become a byword for scandal and sleaze (indeed, the ‘gate’ suffix is now, somewhat bizarrely, attached to any word relating to publicised scandal). Of course numbers too can be affected; 9/11 is no longer simply two numbers, nor is it a date - it is an historic world event, as 7/7 is for Londoners. Then we have glasnost, grassy knoll, hand of god, and countless more.
So how will we remember the current global economic crisis? Have terms such “bail-out’ been sufficiently quoted to go down in history and dictionary? Will the rather long-winded global economic crisis be shortened to ‘GEC’? If it hasn’t so far, it seems unlikely it’ll catch on.
The likelihood is when we look back in the (hopefully not too distant) future, we’ll remember this time as the ‘credit crunch’. I have a few problems with this; first it doesn’t really reflect the magnitude of the situation, and secondly, it sounds like a type of biscuit. But still, since when did vocabulary need to be an exact reflection of real life? All we need is a short, bite-sized word or phrase to embed into our minds and keep the memory alive. Biscuit or not, ‘credit crunch’ rolls off tongue rather nicely, don’t you think?
Comments are closed.