ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
For months, we've been bringing you stories of the subprime crisis, the credit crunch, the recession. They're all aspects of one enormous economic downturn. We know it's historic in its severity, but so far it's also nameless. Reporter Chana Joffe-Walt has been wondering what will we call it?
CHANA JOFFE-WALT: No one struggles with nameless happenings more than journalists who have to talk about nameless happenings day after day after day. Here are two of them. First, Jonathan Wald. He's senior vice president of business news at CNBC.
Mr. JONATHAN WALD (Senior Vice President of Business News, CNBC): We started by calling it the subprime mortgage crisis and then the credit crisis, the credit crunch, when we officially entered a recession, causing some - not on our air - but to call it a "Crecession."
Mr. JOSEPH NOCERO (Reporter, The New York Times): Pandemic, contagion, crisis, catastrophe...
JOFFE-WALT: Joe Nocero covers business for the New York Times.
Mr. NOCERO: I'm not a big crunch fan. It's not a scary enough word. It's sort of almost like a sports term. But meltdown is pretty good.
JOFFE-WALT: Jonathan Wald, the CNBC guy, he says it's really hard when you're in the middle of something to know what it will be called. So all you can do is brand the hell out of it. Wald says in the media, if it's not branded, it basically doesn't exist.
Mr. WALD: When it was clear that this was a big moving target, we created a franchise, a heading for a lot of our coverage on the economy, we called it the New Economy.
JOFFE-WALT: Try to imagine saying this at a bar. He lost his job, you know, because of the New Economy. Or imagine 60 years down the road, yeah, my grandpa has this thing about buying a house. I think because he lived through the Crecession. Maybe what we're living through right now is just too fresh, too much in still-happening mode to be labeled. That's definitely what a historian will tell you.
Dr. ALAN BRINKLEY (Professor of History, Columbia University): I'm Alan Brinkley and I'm a professor of history at Columbia.
JOFFE-WALT: Brinkley says before the Great Depression, economic downturns were generally called panics, the panic of 1837, panic of 1873, '93. So, 1929 comes around, it doesn't become the Great or even Depression right away. It takes a couple of years.
Dr. BRINKLEY: Herbert Hoover thought that panic was too incendiary and would, you know, encourage people to panic. And so he decided to use what he thought was a gentler and less alarming word, and that was Depression.
JOFFE-WALT: Which is funny to think about now, depression being a gentle word? It's not just bad economies that have needed historic labels. What about World War I? It was called the Great War while it was happening. Although Andrew Cohen, he's a historian at Syracuse, he says the Woodrow Wilson administration really tried to name it something else.
Dr. ANDREW COHEN (Professor of History, Syracuse University): In order to convince Americans that the war was a good thing, they gave it a series of labels: the War to Save Democracy, the War to End All Wars.
JOFFE-WALT: World War I didn't get its name until World War II rolled around. So it's probably for the best that the whole "war to end all wars" thing never really stuck. Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Illinois, he says politicians, reporters, historians they are not the experts on naming. He is.
Dr. ALLAN METCALF (Professor of English, MacMurray College): The book I wrote is called "Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success."
JOFFE-WALT: Metcalf says individuals can throw out ideas for names, but it will ultimately be decided by all of us collectively permitting new words into our vocabulary. And to get in, names will need to follow certain rules.
Dr. METCALF: The basic rule for the success of a new word or term is that it doesn't look new. I call it camouflaged or stealth words, a word that you hear for the first time and doesn't strike you as something strange, odd, or funny. Maybe it's not in your vocabulary, but it certainly seems normal and natural.
JOFFE-WALT: So that rules out cute and clever names. Credit crunch, Metcalf says, no chance. Same with the Great Recession. He points out rhyming is a form of cuteness. Several journalists I talked to liked the Great Unwinding because it's descriptive yet still broad. But Metcalf says it's not specific enough, certainly not stealth. And those historians you heard from earlier, they declined to weigh in at all. They're not comfortable until names for cataclysmic events have had at least two generations to prove themselves. For NPR News, I'm Chana Joffe-Walt.
SIEGEL: And if you want to suggest a name for this economy, and you can keep it clean, tell us at our "Planet Money" blog at npr.org/money.