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Keep Your English Up To Datę

19* May 2009

Credit crunch 'Credit crunch’. If you’ve had your head buried in thc sand for a couple of years, you won’t have heard this term. If not, thcn you will certainly havc scen, rcad and heard an awfiil lot about the ‘credit crunch'. CR-cdit CR-unch. It has a nice satisfying ring to it. When you havc a phrasc or expression in w^rhich the first consonant sound of some of the words is the same, it’s callcd ‘alliteration’.

You’11 often fmd alliteration in poetry, nursery rhymes or ‘tongue twisters’ like ‘She sells sea shells on the sea shore’. ‘Crunch’ is a vcry expressivc word, it makes you think ofa brcakfast cercal, or the sound when you’rc trying to park your car and you’rc a bit heavy on the accelcrator. ‘Crunch!’ - oops! ‘Le crunch’ was even an advertising slogan in the 1980s designed to seli a variety of Frcnch apple, 'le crunch’ bcing the sound you madę when biting into it.

But credit crunch, despite its nice friendly sound, has a sinister meaning. Although the term itself is not new (it was coined in the 1960s), it’s only sińce 2007 that it has rcally taken off to become a defining term for the global econonuc downtum which began in August of that year. A search in thc Guardian newspaper rcveals that ‘credit crunch’ was mentioncd just once in January 2007. In Dccembcr of the same year it was used 255 times, while in October 2008, the word was used an extraordinary 686 times!

You may be wondering what the differcnce is between this and the morę usual word for an economic downtum - ‘recession’. Weil, apart firom the fact that it sounds better, the ‘crunch’ rcally means that credit has dried up, thcre’s no morę. For many years, credit was freely availablc - we were all given the chancc to be big spenders, particularly in Britain and the US. “You want to buy a house but you haven’t got any money? No problem. How much do you necd?” It seemed too good to be truć... and it was. As banks collapsed, businesses folded and govemments frantically bailed out, nobody wanted to lend money anymore. If you needed a

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