Words of the Quarter: Talkin’ Hard Times

RECESSION
Let us start with the term most in vogue today: recession, which is presently defined as a decline in a nation’s GDP over two business quarters, and in the United States is officially declared by the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

Nevertheless, the word recession had for centuries been used generally as the noun form of the verb recede, without any special meaning for economics. The term implies that there is a calm and measured decrease. The polar opposite of recession, not so much in terms of denotation but rather connotation, would be crash or plunge.

According to the OED the term was first applied to economics in November 1929, three months after the stock market crash: “The material prosperity of the United States is too firmly based, in our opinion, for a revival in industrial activity–even if we have to face an immediate recession of some magnitude–to be long delayed”.   Despite its inauspicious beginnings in the field, the term has subsequently been applied to describe every economic contraction since the Great Depression, with the exception of the Oil Crisis of the 1970s.

DEPRESSION
The term depression is the noun corresponding to the verb depress, as in to lower, push down, or press down. The use of the term depression in economics actually precedes its use in psychology, where it appears (again, following the OED) to have taken on its present meaning in 1905. The use of the term in economics appears to date from the 1790s, when it was used to describe the economic hardships of the 1780s during and after the Revolutionary War in America.

The common understanding of how hard times work is that a depression is a sort of an evil big brother to a recession.  Perhaps a recession can eventually lead to a depression, or perhaps a recession is like a little depression, relatively benign.  In fact, the term depression, in its origin, was rather mild, as the etymology implies. A simple “pressing down” of wealth and trade. It stood in stoic contrast to the more common term of the 19th century, panic, which gave its name to the Panics of 1797, 1819, 1837, and 1857, before apparently falling into disuse by the 1870s.

So until the 1930s or ‘40s, the terms depression and recession really meant the same thing. How, then, can a recession lead to a depression? The answer is simple: it cannot. This was proven in 1978 when Jimmy Carter chastised his top economic adviser, Albert Kahn, for suggesting that the United States might be heading for a depression. Carter may not have saved the economy, but he did put an end to using the word depression to refer to hard times. The innocuous alternative to Panic incurred perennial guilt by its association with the worst economic downturn in American history. If the current downturn turns out similarly, we can predict that the term recession will be dealt the same hand. The dull calm of which these terms were born is prone to contamination by the toxicity of the problems they describe.

Perhaps the best term for the layman is crisis, which is derived from the Greek verb meaning to decide. For most of its life crisis meant a deciding moment in which a situation comes to a head, particularly an ill patient who either begins to get better, or takes a turn for the worse. A crisis, in this sense, is neither good nor bad but rather, in terms of this discussion, is a point at which critical problems in an economic system are either resolved, or else lead the system as a whole to fall asunder. Any way you call it, we’re talking hard times.

Nicholas Callaway is co-editor of CQ's Arts section, and manages the T.A. Zigarelli & Sons Publishing Co. website. He received his B.A. in linguistics from Reed College in 2007.