"What's in a Word?"
A ruse by any other name would still be deceit...
by Joel Bowman
"Welcome to another installment of your Sunday Session, dear reader, that time of the week when we gather at the virtual saloon, cast a wary eye across the world before us... and quietly wonder, what the hell happened?
When we last left you, one week ago, we were scrambling to catch a plane from Houston back to our home city, here in Argentina. From summer to winter, modern to classic, beltway to sidewalk, the two locales could hardly be more distinct from one and other. “It’s almost like going back in time,” wife Anya remarked as our airport taxi careened along the broad Avenida 9 de Julio. “Whenever we come home, I get the feeling like we never left.”
Indeed, Buenos Aires is the kind of city you could leave for two weeks and come back to find everything changed... or leave for two decades and return to find it just the same. Prices, for example, fluctuate daily. But the country remains firmly rooted in the past. Its Belle Epoch-style buildings. Its cafe culture. Its firm resistance to anything “politically correct.”
Local, independent supermarkets – run largely by the city’s Asian population – are still called “chinos.” People call each other, affectionately, nicknames like “gordo” (fatty), “flaca” (skinny) and even “loco” (crazy). And, contrary to what progressives in the English speaking world would have you believe, Latinos largely despise the cringeworthy “Latinx” mutilation of their elegantly gendered language.
A 2020 Pew Research poll found that, while a quarter of Hispanics in the US had heard of the gender-neutral term, only 3% actually used it themselves. Outside the US, that figure quickly approaches zero. Turns out, Spanish speakers don’t appreciate self-righteous virtue signalers (many of whom do not even speak Spanish) colonizing their language and rewriting the rules. Gee, who would have thought?
Speaking of words, you’ve no doubt heard of the hullabaloo over the dreaded “R-word” by now. It was enough to send armchair economists back to their old Funk & Wagnalls for a quick refresher. Of course, the semantic struggle regarding the technical definition of recession represents just one front in a much larger battle. More in today’s feature essay, below...
"What’s in a Word?"
by Joel Bowman
"That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet..."
~ Joan Shakespeare’s eldest brother, from Romeo and Juliet
"That which we call a ruse
By any other name would still be deceit..."
~ Joel (with apologies to William)
"As a man who has spent much of his adulthood aspiring to the life of a failed novelist, your weekend correspondent believes the right word can paint a thousand pictures. We cultivate an appreciation for words as a cobbler tends to his sole or a fencer his foil; with care and respect for their utility and precision. They help us navigate the murky, ethereal realm of ideas, allowing us to communicate complex concepts with ease and accuracy, facility and fidelity. At least, that’s the aim.
It is with a leaden heart, therefore, that we observe the wanton corruption of the English language on an almost daily basis. Words we once found reliable, dependable, credible, are routinely conscripted, pressed into service by linguistic vandals, made to abet one or another insidious agenda. Words like transitory... racism... vaccine... female... and now recession... have been strapped to the Procrustean bed and either amputated or elongated to suit the villainous whims of their abductors.
Witness the most recent of these lexical distortions, a definitional brouhaha bordering on the farcical. In the week preceding the second quarter’s GDP read – widely expected by “experts” to be slightly positive (consensus was for a 0.03% expansion) but which actually came back negative by 0.9% – the White House and their lapdogs in the mainstream media began a “forward messaging” campaign to defang the commonly used term, recession.
Most people, most of the time, define recession as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Not so this time around. The situation was “complicated,” chorused the neutered neckties across all the usual media outlets. The White House even put out its own blog post:
"What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle. Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data - including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes. Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year - even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter - indicates a recession."
~ White House
Wax and Blindfolds: Who are these “holistic economists,” American workers must have wondered as they waded through an economy that looked, sounded and felt very much like it was in a recession. Bonner Private Research’s resident macro analyst, Dan Denning, went through the jobs numbers on Friday and found that, not only was the real unemployment rate closer to 9.6% – as opposed to the 3.5% figure spruiked by the administration and their pets in the press – but real wages, adjusted for 40-year high inflation, were actually falling. Moreover, a meaningful portion of the jobs “created” were second and/or part time jobs, taken by people struggling to make ends meet with their primary employment. Far from the “roaring recovery” Americans are constantly assured they are experiencing, the labor force participation rate is actually the same as it was back in March... of 1977.
Never mind all that, says Mr. President. What we’re actually witnessing (if you’ll kindly close your eyes and plug your ears with wax) is the “strongest rebound in American manufacturing in over three decades.” (All together now!) “It doesn’t sound like a recession to me,” the apparently tone deaf president added after the negative GDP figures were published.
Mercifully, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was on hand to help further complicate, obfuscate and otherwise pontificate, explaining the situation from her podium: “We’re not going to define a recession from here,” Madam Secretary went on to say, insisting that the White House would instead defer to the National Bureau of Economic Research to make the call. Good move.
As it happens, the NBER has been making the call now... for over 70 years. In fact, they made the call in every single instance where GDP fell for two consecutive quarters going all the way back to 1949. That is to say, ten times the US economy logged two consecutive quarters of negative growth over the past seven decades... ten times the NBER called recession.
Words Like Weapons: Of course, the majority of those official recessions occurred before the advent of the Internet, where facts are confused with opinions and everyone claims the right to their own. Gone are the days when people consulted actual, physical, hard to doctor encyclopedias, for example, as opposed to “living” reference repositories, such as Wikipedia, which blow with the prevailing political winds.
Until as recently as July 11, to follow the current thread, the world’s largest online encyclopedia had featured the commonly accepted definition of a recession. Tucked away under the subtitle, “Definition,” it read: “In a 1974 New York Times article, Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Julius Shiskin suggested several rules of thumb for defining a recession, one of which was two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Over time, the other rules of thumb were forgotten.”
As of July 25, however, all mention of the “two consecutive quarters” had been scrubbed from the site. An administrator also locked the page, barring users from making any edits or corrections. From July 27 onward, the wiki world would feature a new, rather more pliable definition: "In the United States, a recession is defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."
In one section of the website, a Wikipedia user claimed the change was made to reflect the “change in posture and the definition at the United States since the White House’s experts are expanding the meaning of it.” That section has since been deleted. Nothing to see here, citizen. Move along. (h/t to the folks at Unherd for screen-shotting past posts and publishing the story.)
Needless to say, there are those among us who say that it matters not what we call a thing. “A rose by any other name,” and all that. There is a certain amount of truth there. And yes, language evolves over time. Always has. Always will. “Change,” as ol’ Heraclitus observed, “is the only constant.”
Only, we’re not talking here about the kind of natural, gradual, consensual idiomatic evolution that is always and everywhere underway... during which informal words like “dank” and “fat” and “dope” acquire positive connotations and others, such as “elite,” “skeptic” and “Brandon” morph into pejoratives. Rather, we refer to an artificial, abrupt, aggressive transformation of our language for explicitly political purposes. There is a world of difference between the two.
Unlike schoolyard slang and barroom colloquialisms, which change from venue to venue, month to month, what we are witnessing is something far more nefarious, a creeping tendency of those who “know better” to constantly redefine the key terms by which we guide our own lives and by which we are governed. Far from a case of “mere semantics,” such corruption of the language has real world consequences for millions of people.
In the end, honest people will decide for themselves the weight of a word and whether they are being deceived by their self-serving leaders. It is during these times we call to mind the words of Mr. Thomas Jefferson: It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
And that’s all from us today, dear reader. Bill will be back with his regular daily missives from tomorrow. In the meantime, we’re heading off to grab a milanesa and a long overdue glass of malbec at one of our favorite local restaurants, Massey Familia. Whatever you’re doing this weekend, be good… or be good at it."
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