For the Record
Dean Wright on Ethics, Innovation and Values
Watching our language: Writing about the financial crisis
Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.
The global financial crisis may have drained the coffers of investors, businesses and nations, but it’s making our language a bit richer as we discover, revive, coin and develop words and phrases to help make sense of it all.
Some take hold quickly and spread far and wide. “Bailout,” naturally, was voted Word of the Year for 2008 by the American Dialect Society and by Merriam-Webster and was No. 2 on Time’s “Top 10 Buzzwords” (a list that also included “staycation,” a frugal vacation spent close to home). Interestingly—and predictively, as it turned out—the dialect society’s 2007 Word of the Year was “subprime.”
There is a blizzard of language that strives to describe—but sometimes obscures—the strange new financial world we’re in. Television shows, websites and talk radio have exhorted us to buy or sell, have faith or run for our lives, be calm and just trust CEOs or don’t believe a word they say. It’s enough to make you wonder if screenwriter William Goldman’s famous assessment of Hollywood—”Nobody knows anything”—applies here.
We who make our livings in financial journalism have a responsibility to help show the way through the blizzard—to translate and explain, or at least not to make it any more confusing. To that end, here at Reuters News, we’re updating our financial glossary. We want it to be a living document that changes as the world it describes changes. When we’re finished with updates, we plan to open it up to our users as a wiki. In the meantime, take a look and feel free to comment on this blog.
I also want to invite all of you to post on this blog your own words and phrases that capture the essence of the financial situation or help you make sense of it. Or you might want to share words and phrases that you’d like to see disappear from the language because they confuse and obfuscate, rather than illuminate.
Some words describing phenomena and financial tools that are causes or effects of the global financial crisis have quickly come into common usage. For many people, definitions for these important terms are still less than clear. Among them:
I’ve noticed that a whole lot of journalists here in the UK appear so used to these linguistic games that even a year on, they still don’t realise that a toxic asset is something different to a bad asset. (Count the number of columns along the lines of “WHY can’t the Treasury value them?”) Presumably they think it’s just another trendy rebranding….