D-word itself was a euphemism! - soc.retirement

Message from discussion D-word itself was a euphemism!
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From: Harry Thompson <m...@privacy.net>
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Subject: D-word itself was a euphemism!
Date: Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:00:05 -0600
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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