From the mouths of babes: when tiny tots talk recession

When my son was in kindergarten, at a parent-teacher meeting his teacher talked about how wide and varied his vocabulary was. At the age oof four he used words like client, news reporting, itinerary, etc., and as she told the other parents, they looked suitably impressed. Not me; I realized that he was only using words he had heard them used by me and my travel agent husband.

Just like him then, kids today are increasingly using recession-related vocabulary, reflecting the turbulent economic climate they live in.

A survey by Ireland-based iReach Market Research last year showed that 90% of Irish children have been affected by the economic events that are topics of discussion at the dinner table. Three in 10 parents, or 27% of them, said that recession was part of their children’s vocabulary.

Unemployment (20%) was the second most frequent recession-related word heard from children, according to the survey that targeted parents of kids aged between five and 15.

The survey also said that children are talking about the credit crunch (16%), redundancy (15%), NAMA or Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency (15%), mortgage rates (13%) and interest rates (10%). The words less commonly used by children include negative equity (7%), overdrawn (6%), recessionista (1%) and staycation (1%).

This is the case in just one country. But the story is repeated across the world. And it is not surprising considering throughout history, traumatic events have changed vocabulary.

As far back as 1953, Time magazine wrote of the new jargon where “recession” became “rolling readjustment,” a “correction,” a “slippage,” an “easing,” a “slight downturn.” The writer could have been talking of today. Take a look at the newspaper. How many times can you count these words on just one page?

Switch on the television. How many experts, anchors and analysts use exactly these terms to describe today’s economy? In a strange ironical deja vu, the world seems to be standing still even as it hurtles along.

We use language every day–to tell our stories, the story of the world we live in, the story of what is happening around us. And when words literally fail us, we coin new ones.

During World War I, soldiers who went out looking for honor and found barbarity, inhumanity and bloodshed created so many words that writer Samuel Hynes said the English that emerged from the war was a “damaged” language, not very different from the soldiers who spoke it.

For example, they would not mention death by name, preferring to say someone had gone west or had hopped it. Or calling a wound that was not life-threatening but was serious enough for the person to be sent home as a “blighty,” a term coined from the Hindi word for foreigners, brought all the way from India by the British soldiers.

How different is it from the post-recession “staycation” for when we can’t afford to go on a vacation?

Today, words that have become common currency include “shovel ready” and “bailout,” which was designated by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary as the word of the year in 2008.

Whether these words will last and become part of the dictionary is still a moot point, but after the events of recent weeks, I wouldn’t be surprised if a toddler came up to me and talked about debt ceiling or offer to make a debt deal.

Platts