Should the Great Recession be talked and written about as a proper noun? Recessions tend to be vague in their scale and timelines, so it’s problematic to mention them as proper nouns. Perhaps the similarities in sound between Great Recession and Great Depression have encouraged this usage by government officials and members of the press. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Great Recession”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Martha Grant, hi.
Hi, who’s this?
Hello there.
This is Eric calling from Des Moines, Iowa.
Welcome.
Hi, Eric.
I have got a question for you.
I’m a writer and editor for an investment firm.
And one of the things that I’ve seen coming up in, like, portfolio manager commentary and and different economic stuff that our firm puts out is the term the Great Recession, with capital letters, all proper noun-y and everything.
And what I’m wondering is, is the Great Recession a thing?
I mean, has it attained the status of the Great Depression?
Which in what little research I was able to do, I found out that it even took a couple of years for the Great Depression to catch on.
So because I’m set with kind of dictating what policy is through our firm, I wanted to get your opinion on whether the Great Recession was a thing or not.
What are you inclined to do?
Frankly, I don’t think it’s a thing.
I kind of feel like everybody wants to feel like their generation suffered more than anybody.
That’s right. We’re talking boomers here, right?
For the most part, yeah. And it just seems a little bit too close. And I know it was a very bad time from 2007 until 2009 and continuing.
But what I could find, I think that I’d found references to the Great Recession for about every recession going back to 1900.
As a formal term, right?
Correct.
Same here. I found the same thing when I was researching this a few years ago, that it had been used with some regularity since the 1970s for every single downturn.
And partly it was used by the opponents to whatever administration was currently in power.
Now, with this administration, we have a recession that has some interesting characteristics, and I won’t go into them here.
But it is a little different than some previous recessions, and we have a far more active and visible media.
So the term has been used tens of thousands, if not millions of times.
And so it has been widespread.
I don’t think it’s going to go away, but I think that your instinct as far as your internal use is sound.
I think it should be avoided and I think it should be avoided in formal contexts because it is so vague and inspecific.
The Great Recession isn’t over, theoretically, if you still want to call it the Great Recession.
Even when it started in around 2007, that’s in dispute.
Some people say it starts in 2006.
Some people say it doesn’t really get going to 2008.
In any case, it’s a vague term.
It’s harder to find its boundaries, its beginning and its end.
And it’s got a little bit of a taint, as you’re saying, of let’s make something big out of this so that we can talk about it, not because it’s actually big.
Right?
And I don’t mean to diminish any kind of problems that people have had.
The recession hurt us all one way or the other.
But I do mean to say that the Great Recession isn’t a term that I would formally use in a textbook or in papers filed with the SEC or if I were writing about the stock market in a way that I was recommending or dis-recommending stocks for purchase.
Sure.
I would avoid the term for now.
I mean, if you’re writing popular…
A blog entry or something?
Yeah, a popular economic device for a general interest newspaper, fine.
Go ahead and use it.
But for the formal stuff, the stuff where you really need to be specific, I would avoid it.
Sure.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Cool.
Thanks for calling, Eric.
Good instincts.
We’ll see you.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Granted, it feels like a great recession when you’re in it, but I guess your point is that…
Yeah, it felt like that in the 90s.
It felt like that in the 80s.
It felt like that in the 70s.
And those are the only recessions that I remember.
But they all felt the same when I was in the middle of them.
Yeah.
Like terrible times were ahead and it would never get better.
Yeah.
Maybe we should call it the not-so-great recession.
And then you pass through it, and you’re like, okay, I did this.
I made it through.
Yeah.
Things are getting better.
Yeah.
And they are, aren’t they?
The sun’s going to come out.
Yeah.
