The British candy Flumps.The economics meme of the day appears to be naming the current downturn. A while back, our friends at Economix solicited reader suggestions, of which my favorite was “The Great Deception.” At Dubner’s urging, Freako readers chimed in with more alternatives. The Times‘s William Safire has also addressed this linguistic puzzle, offering various options, including the Safirrific “economic detumenscence.” And the emerging favorite, the “Great Recession,” was struck down in a neat piece of research by Catherine Rampell, whose careful combing of the archives revealed that “Every recession of the last several decades has, at some point or another, received this special designation.”
Always last to any such fad, I polled my economist friends on Facebook, and that formed the basis for a little piece I did for NPR’s Marketplace last week. (Text here; listen to it here.) The winning suggestion?
The best idea comes from Doireann Fitzgerald, an Irish economist at Stanford. She suggests we call it a “Clump,” short for credit slump, or a “Flump,” which denotes a financial slump. As she said, “Flump has a pleasing whiff of incompetence about it.”
Oh, and for a whiff of nostalgia: remember back when we were debating whether to even call it a recession?
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I’ve been calling it the Econopocalypse, and everybody seems to know what I’m talking about.
How about The Great Grandkid Burdening? We could just call it The Great Grandkid for short, because that’s more of a quaint name, and it would also reference the people who will be paying for it all.
Once again, Freakonomics is maligning English culture, just like with the pasties.
Flumps are tiny furry creatures that play in a brass band:
http://www.thechestnut.com/flumps.htm
A Flump? Like these?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1mMQtk3IUE
(I’m not sure whether the HTML will work, but I guess I’m about to find out…)
Why not “Rational Anuberance?”
Other than the fact no such word exists…
Interesting. “Flump” is the term we use to describe what our 8-month-old does when he flops and slumps at the same time.
What do Lewis Carrol’s “Through the Looking Glass” and the current financial situation have in common?
Let me explain:
The word “flump” is a classic example of a portmanteau, which I just learned about at Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day (I suggest all of you check it out and subscribe).
Portmanteau by definition means: “1) a word coined by blending two or more words; and 2) a case opening in two parts, used for carrying clothes while traveling.”
Apparently, as Garg points out, Carrol used the term to explain a combined word in his book, “Through the Looking Glass.” During a discussion about a certain poem, Humpty Dumpty says to Alice: “Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’. ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active’. You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.”
And that brings me to my point: “clump” or “flump” are the blending of two words “credit and slump” and “financial and slump” to create a set of new words! And I’m sure that both would pass Humpty Dumpty muster!
Economics and fair tales? Who wudda thunk?
Bozonomics