Harry Thompson <m...@privacy.net>

And here I thought that "depression" was the honest word everybody is
avoiding. But it turns out that "depression" was itself a euphemism for
"crisis", which was a euphemism for "panic."

Here is JK Galbraith on one euphemism replacing another as each got ugly.

 From Chapter 9: The Price

Redefined definitions: panic, crisis, depression, recession, growth
correction

Extracts from "Money: Whence it came, where it went" by John Kenneth
Galbraith (First Published 1975), Page 113

"Where economic misfortune is concerned, a word on nomenclature is
necessary. In the course of his disastrous odyssey Pal Joey, the most
inspired of John O'Hara's creations, finds himself singing in a Chicago
crib strictly for cakes and coffee. He explains this misfortune by
saying that the panic is still on. His term - archaic and thus slightly
pretentious - reflects the unfailing O'Hara ear. During the last century
and until 1907, the United States had panics. But, by 1907, the language
was becoming, like so much else, the servant of economic interest. To
minimize the shock to confidence, businessmen and bankers had started to
explain that any current economic setback was not really a panic, only a
crisis. They were undeterred by the use of this term in a much more
ominous context - that of the ultimate capitalist crisis - by Marx. By
the 1920's, however, the word crisis had also acquired the fearsome
connotation of the event it described. Accordingly, men offered
reassurance by explaining that it was not a crisis, only a depression. A
very soft word. Then the Great Depression associated the most frightful
of economic misfortunes with that term, and economic semanticists now
explained that no depression was in prospect, at most only a recession.
In the 1950s, when there was a modest setback, economists and public
officials were united in denying that it was a recession - only a
sidewise movement or a rolling readjustment. Mr Herbert Stein, the
amiable man whose difficult honor it was to serve as the economic voice
of Richard Nixon, would have referred to the panic of 1893 as a growth
correction"

Lifted from http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/books/galbraith_money.html