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Recession Spawns an Expanding Lexicon for a Shrinking Economy

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: terms from the recession. Dictionary editor Ben Zimmer is back with us. And it sounds like he's going to start with a popular term these days, "shovel-ready." 

(Sound of shoveling)

BEN ZIMMER: "Well, shovel-ready is a term that's been used to describe infrastructure projects that are ready to go when stimulus money is available. The new stimulus package has passed the Congress and they are prioritizing those projects that are already planned out. And all they need is the money to get started and people can start digging in and getting to work right away."

AA: "And we know that some of these projects are not in the traditional sense of building roads or rebuilding bridges, they're more health care investments, educational investments. Is there a term to describe those, or are those in danger of being left out because they can't claim they're shovel-ready because they don't involve shovels -- "

RS: "Or don't involve digging?"

BEN ZIMMER: "I think that there are metaphorical shovels at work in those other types of projects. Even though it starts with construction projects, things that are obviously related to digging in with shovels, it's definitely been extended to other things. So you can be shovel-ready even if you don't have a shovel."

RS: "What other terms have come about in recent months because of our economic situation?"

BEN ZIMMER: "Well, we've heard a lot of terms coming out of the banking sector. The Treasury Department has said that it's going to evaluate banks by using a 'stress test.' In the medical sense, you can undergo a stress test to see, for instance, how strong your heart is. So that's used as a diagnostic method in medicine.

"Stress tests are also used, for instance, in information technology to test software, to see how robust the software is given different situations. In the financial sense, it's to determine how robust a bank or other financial institution is to withstand further economic conditions that could increasingly get worse in the future."

RS: "And now we have words like 'good bank' and 'bad bank' and 'zombie bank.' What are those?"

BEN ZIMMER: "Well, the zombie bank is a term that's been used to refer to a bank that really should have gone bust but it's being kept alive by government guarantees in the form of bailout money, for instance. So there are banks that people are saying 'Well, it's really just surviving because it's being propped up by the government.' So it's a zombie -- it's really already dead, but the government is somehow trying to keep alive a bank that's already dead because its stock is almost worthless, its value has really gone under. And so people are talking about zombie banks in this way.

"But there are a lot of banks that are in a kind of a gray area right now, where it's unclear what their future is going to be. And what happens with them will really be contingent on what happens with the government taking over their bad debt, what's often called 'toxic debt' or 'toxic assets.' And so the proposal is to have a government-run bank, which has been labeled a bad bank, that would allow these private banks to unload all of their bad debt.

"There are people in the government who don't like that term. They would prefer to call it an 'aggregator bank' because it aggregates all of this toxic debt from the private banks and allows the government to deal with it without the government completely taking over the bank."

RS: "With the term bad bank, you really know what you've got, though."

BEN ZIMMER: "And oftentimes we need some distance on a particular event before we really know what the terminology is that we're using to describe it. For instance, we don't really even know what to call this current economic downturn. There have been lots of suggestions about calling it the Great Recession or the Great Credit Crunch or various other terms. But like the Great Depression in the nineteen thirties, we probably need some distance before we really have a label that will stick."

AA: Ben Zimmer is executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, an online thesaurus and dictionary. So what would you call the economic situation right now? Give us your suggestions and comments at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster where you can also find a whole list of recession-related terms that Ben has put together. And that's WORDMASTER for this week. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

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