A Crisis... No, a Panic... No, a Depression... No, a Recession... No, a Rollng Readjustment...
Michael Perelman writes:
A half-century ago, John Kenneth Galbraith had a marvelous description of the shaping of language regarding crises. Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1958. The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 38:
Marx's reference to the "capitalist crisis" gave the word an ominous sound. The word panic, which was a partial synonym a half century ago, was no more reassuring. As a result, the word depression was gradually brought into use. This had a softer tone; it implied a yielding of the fabric of business activity and not a crashing fall. During the great depression, the word depression acquired from the event described an even more unsatisfactory connotation. Therefore, the word recession was substituted to connote an unfearsome fall in business activity. But this term eventually acquired a foreboding quality and a recession in 1953-1954 was widely characterized as a rolling readjustment. By the time of the Nixon administration, the innovative phrase "growth recession" was brought into use...
Somehow though, neither "rolling readjustment" nor "growth recession" displaced "recession"...
