So many ways to say we’re in trouble
Without an Inuit thesaurus I have no way of checking how many words the Eskimos really have for snow, but each day’s newspapers reveal just how large a lexicon we have for an economy going into reverse. Recession, depression, downturn, decline, disinflation, slump, slowdown, squeeze, freeze, meltdown, bust, crash, crunch, collapse, for starters. But when the economy was booming the only word we heard was, well, boom.
I could add in all those euphemisms beloved by ministers such as ‘testing times’ and ‘difficult conditions’, but why are there so many terms for a shrinking economy but such little choice when it grows? We even invent new words like ‘hyperflation’ and ‘stagflation’ to add colour to the bad times, but if ‘deflation’ is another negative term, ‘inflation’ is not its positive opposite.
It would be easy to suggest that, like the Eskimos and their glossary of snow words, we have so many ways to describe a slump because that’s all we know. But there has not been recession in the UK for 16 years: we did not need the extensive vocabulary of slowdown phrases. No, the reason for the dearth of words to describe a boom is because we never think there is one. We have convinced ourselves that those were not 16 years of fat to be balanced at some point by lean years, but that they were normal — and, by implication, the better-than-average years were still to come.
We have Black Mondays but no white ones when shares rise. We can argue between hard landings and soft landings but there is no phrase for the economy’s zenith. So while we are now in a financial crisis, there is no antonym of that term to describe the recent years — no expression for the excess of the decade of living beyond our means.
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