NEW YORK (AP) – Greece’s debt crisis has spawned its own awkward argot. For those in the know, clunky terms like “Grexit” are shorthand, a quick way of saving a bundle of words. For everybody else, they’re as mysterious as hieroglyphs.
Wall Street types and economists have been wrestling with language to explain Greece’s crisis since it started more than five years ago. First came the strained metaphors. Greece, the birthplace of drama, was the setting for a three-act tragedy. Now, it seems like every new twist in the story gets the prefix “Gr” slapped on it.
Why is this happening? People working in finance like to boil down ungainly phrases. The Federal Reserve’s effort to spur economic growth, known as quantitative easing to academics, became QE. The second round was christened QE2.
Social media sites egg the process on. On Twitter, a bunch of words crammed together with a hash mark make messages easier to find. It’s not the Greek crisis anymore, just #grisis.
“It’s part of the gallows humor that the financial world is fond of,” says Guy LeBas, chief fixed income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott. “Sticking a ‘gr’ in front of a word makes it slightly amusing.”