In English Language A-level we get to chew over topical language issues and what could be more of our time linguistically than 'cost of living crisis'?

Recently, the Somerset County Gazette and NatWest launched a campaign “aimed at supporting local SMEs through the cost-of-living crisis.”

That article includes some of the huge number of English jargon words about economics, business, and money: ‘inflation’ ‘interest rates’ ‘SME’ ‘stakeholder’. The economy is an area of our language rich with creativity, if you’ll pardon a pun.

In class last week we counted off an easy list of slang words for money: fiver, tenner, quid, wonga, and dosh, all came quickly from the students present. Jonathan Green in his online Dictionary of Slang suggests there are over 3,300 slang words for money in English – the third largest category after crime and drink.

The media seems to load emotion on this economic lexicon. We may remember the era of ‘austerity’; just before that, we lived through the ‘credit crunch’ that the Oxford English Dictionary notes was around as a phrase even in the 1960s. Go back another generation and there was the 'Great Depression'.

Now we have the emotive ‘cost of living crisis’. There were 482 million articles and references in a quick check of Google in mid-October. Is a ‘crisis’ worse than a ‘crunch’? Some linguists suggest language can determine how we feel. Which is more painful: a ‘recession’, a ‘slump’, or a ‘crash’?

We are more and more about ‘inflation’. We may have had different economic measurements (RPI, CPI?) but we all know what rising prices are when we see them. ‘Inflation’ as a word that describes price rises dates back to at least 1821 by the OED, reminding us that the idea spawned many related words, some being what we call compounds: inflation-adjusted, inflation-busting, inflation-linked; and ‘inflation rate’; the opposite idea ‘deflation’ and the strangely-termed blending ‘stagflation’ (stagnant growth with inflation).

Whether these words and phrases last or fade away (‘boom and bust’, ‘prudence’ ‘balanced budgets’?), like many new words in English, when they latch on to big ideas that surround us, these neologisms are not just the stuff of A-level linguistics discussions, they become part of our lives and our everyday language.

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Marcus Barrett is a teacher of English Language A-level at Richard Huish College, Taunton, and is a Trustee of The English Project, Winchester.