In a headline by the Independent online newspaper today, some confusion was created regarding recent trends in the food prices in the UK. The phrase “plunging food inflation” left me wondering if prices were going up or down. I don’t think that it’s British understatement; rather I suspect it’s that the journalist couldn’t think of the right word to use.
- Image via Wikipedia
Even the article itself isn’t all that clear. It was only after reading it through a few times that I was able to ascertain that what he really meant to say was that prices had fallen. Well, why not just say so? The word is deflation. What’s so hard about that?
If we can’t rely on people who write for a living to say what they mean, what chance do the rest of us have? May be Fleet Street could use a remedial course in vocabulary.
Bruce Hoag, PhD, CPsychol
Work Psychologist
Tags: Deflation, Fleet Street, Food, Inflation, The Independent
Or, maybe the journalist was just pitching it at his target audience and thought “plunging inflation” would make more sense to them than “deflation”. I can make sense of both, it says more about you than the journalist that you can’t.
Humor me. What does a graph of something plunging look like? And, what does a graph of inflation look like? To me, they’re going in opposite directions. How can they both be true simultaneously?
“Inflation” is a loaded word and an actual name of a financial driven index. “Deflation” does not have the same association. So a head line saying the index called “inflation” has plunged makes perfect sense.
I consult in the finance sector regularly and I knew what the head line meant, maybe you need to look outside your classroom and dictionary into the real world.
I suspect that the great majority of The Independent’s readers are not financial journalists. So rather than sending us to a dictionary or into the “real world” as you call it, perhaps it would be more beneficial is you spared a few lines to educate us on the jargon.
Jargon? It is common usage, which also happens to be used by the industry experts. From the BBC news website: “Inflation is expected to start heading down in the near term as temporary upward pressures start to unwind”
Inflation going down? What madness this is? Here is another one:
“inflation expectations are starting to drift up”
All these articles are aimed at general readers, just like the newspaper.
Everyone else seems to understand the meaning except you.
On the off-chance that I was out of the loop, I searched on the internet to see if I could find a definition of what, to me, is an oxymoron. Apparently the phrase, plunging inflation, has been in use for some time; but that has done nothing to clarify the meaning. Another blogger was equally confused a couple of years ago.
The article to which he refers actually describes an economic phenomenon in which the rate of inflation decreases. The term “deflation” does refer to “a fall in the average level of all prices,” and a “deflationary economy” is one where this condition is present.
In my search, I noticed that the phrase “plunging inflation” was used by some journalists, but that it was far from ubiquitous. My search of the phrase in quotation marks (inverted commas, if you prefer) yielded just over 1600 hits on the entire Web. On the other hand, many more news sites, government agencies and universities referred to the event as deflation.
My goal is not to win a war of words, but rather to simply point out that the terminology that’s obvious to some people is less so to others. Truce?