“We are currently witnessing the worst credit crunch the world has ever seen since the term was invented last year.”
I heard someone saying that on the radio a couple of weeks ago and it made me laugh. It also made we wonder when the term really did come into existence.
I can’t find anything online about its origin but a search of the Guardian archives shows that it was used as early as 1992:
Perhaps early uses of the noun-noun collocation came from poetic journalists and then it became a familiar homehold term when the need arose.
The term, Credit Crunch, is a great example of a self-explaining compound. These are associations between words, especially nouns, whose meaning in combination is different to the individual words themselves. For example:
- Leap year
- Carbon footprint
- Couch potato
- Traffic jam
- Belly button
- Soap opera
- One-hit wonder
Old English had a much smaller lexis than modern English and took this type of vocabulary construction to an extreme. A shield was a war-board, the sea was the whale-road and a body was a bone-house. Modern German also has a strong tendency to create self-explaining compounds rather than borrow words from other languages.
The ability to form word associations like these is one linguistic feature that allows for creativity or playfulness in language. For example:
4 responses so far ↓
1 admin // Dec 19, 2008 at 1:27 am
Just remembered that I said I would write a screen capture posting. That’ll be on its way.
2 Lindsay // Dec 19, 2008 at 10:43 am
Nice posting Jamie. I think there’s also an element of phonology in the “credit crunch” compound that leads to playfulness. The repetition of cr…cr… leads to the other words beginning with c (cookbook, cretin) and the final credit crunch lunch is also playing with the sounds of the word too.
Following that, I would expect to see other plays on it like the following
a credit crunch munch (for a cheap chocoloate bar)
the credit crunch crowd (for boxing day shoppers)
the cruel credit crunch (for whatever)
the credit crunch crouch (for a new kind of dance)
credit crunch crook (for new crimes committed by desperate real estate agents)
Thanks for the posting and the images… good (credit crunch) choices
And so on…
3 admin // Dec 22, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Hello Lindsay. Recently a student of mine (hello Cristina) was asking me about alliteration. This is exactly what we are looking at here.
Wikipedia definition: “The repeated occurrence of the same consonant sound at the beginning of several words in the same phrase”.
As well as alliteration, rhyme and rhythm are also in play in the noun collocations.
By the way, a couple of years ago I had a feeling that we would be heading towards this economic situation. I had a Credit Crunch Hunch.
Sorry.
4 Jeremy // Jan 7, 2009 at 11:53 pm
Great work as usual, Jamie! Though I’m sure the Munch Bunch had a credit crunch hunch before you! I like the 2 for 1 on deserts - I’ll take the Gobi and the Kalahari please.
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