The current global economic crisis is now over 18 months old and journalists worldwide have continued to coin new words to describe new, and not so new, elements of the present downturn. I have looked for some of the new terms being used by various media correspondents and want to share these with our readers.
It is interesting that most of the new words that I have researched relate to the unemployed who have sadly become so numerous worldwide in the last several months. As company after company decides to jettison experienced staff in the hope of surviving the economic storm, many more workers are experiencing the soul-wrenching experience of being unemployed.
Rather than humour, I have experienced nothing but sadness in this exercise. Those who join the ranks of the unemployed often interpret this event in their lives as a sign of personal failure.
The social psychologist Alain de Botton has a memorable quotation on the fear of failure that people sometimes experience: "Fear of the material consequences of failure is compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards failure, of its haunting proclivity to refer to those who have failed as 'losers' - a word callously signifying both that people have lost and that they have at the same time forfeited any right to sympathy for having done so."
This fear of failure has led to many journalists coining new euphemistic words to describe the plight of those who have been affected negatively by the current recession. Let us have a look at some of these words.
My favourite is "recession roadkill" to describe the laid-off, the unemployed, and those generally getting run over by the merciless wheels of the economy. The implication of this term is that such dreadful events hit people indiscriminately and through no fault of the victims - just like most road accidents.
"Recession hacking" is used to describe the ability of the victims of the recession to find ideas for dealing with the downturn. Such techniques range from giving up dining out to saving money on cell phone calls and shopping in low cost supermarkets. Living within one's means is an effective strategy for those who find that they cannot afford past luxuries.
This reality has probably given rise to another new term: "blingrupt" - a sudden inability to afford luxury goods. An interesting social survey quoted by the New York Times has indicated how the public's perception of what "necessities" are has changed since the inception of the current recession. An increasing number of Americans are now considering such items as televisions and air conditioners as being no longer necessities but have become luxuries.
When a worker is "outshipped" it means that his company has offered him a new lesser paid job in a developing country rather than be sacked. IBM seems to have inspired this new term when it offered some of its workers such an option to go and work in India, Brazil or China.
Perhaps more cruel is the fate of those who face a "slayoff" - a particularly cold-blooded method of laying off employees, such as breaking the news or redundancy by an SMS or an email. We have had our own examples of employers reassuring their employees on a Friday that their jobs were safe, and then telling them that they were being sacked on the following Monday. Some workers experience misery by being "pre-fired". This means that they lose their job even before being actually hired. Many apprentices and workers on probation caught in the midst of the recession never moved to the next stage of employment because their potential employer decided that he could no longer afford to pay new workers. There is little to be positive about if you find yourself in a situation that is described as "funemployment" - a period of joblessness that you actually enjoy. The fun part of this experience, of course, depends on your accumulated savings and severance pay. Penury is hardly ever a fun experience.
"Homeworking" is not an experience one should associate with schoolchildren in the current economic crisis. In fact, it refers to the activity of the newly unemployed who might decide to convert their spare bedroom, kitchen or attic to an office from where they can conduct some kind of activity that can ease their financial burdens.
Being made redundant is possibly as bad an experience as losing a dear relative, experiencing a marriage breakdown, or being affected by a life threatening disease. Human nature tries to deal with this trauma by finding terms that avoid the sense of despair and failure associated with this experience. These neologisms help to achieve this, but the real pain of those affected remains.
johncassarwhite@yahoo.com