“Even the nickname for the legislation,” wrote Victoria McGrane in the Politico newspaper this month, “ — a cram down — sounds like trouble.” She described the bill being pushed by Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, a pal of the president and a power in the Democratic Senate, as akin to a “political hand grenade being tossed into the economic stimulus negotiations.” A lobbyist for the nation’s mortgage bankers, a group that does not want to catch that grenade, agreed: “Cramdown is an impediment to passing a stimulus quickly.”
A hearty welcome to a new noun. Financial lingo can be colorful: bailout, with its image of passengers in a leaky vessel using tin cans to heave water out of the boat, was selected as the 2008 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. Haircut, snipping away at the value of investments, was given a rinse and blow-dry in this space recently. Stockbrokers watching any move upward in the indices hope it is not a dead-cat bounce, a macabre metaphor that distresses pet lovers. The political phrase lame duck began as a British description of bankrupt businessmen.
Which brings us to borrowers on the brink. The noun cramdown, back-formed from a verb phrase, was coined in 1668 by Lord Chaworth in a report on the papers of the Duke of Rutland: “I would advise you to eate your words, else Ile . . . crame them downe your throate with my sworde.” (We’ve dropped e a lot since then, but the fearsome metaphor suggesting indigestibility is still with us.) To cram down is “to stuff into an unwilling recipient,” much as Shakespeare earlier used the figure of speech in “The Tempest”: “You cram these words into mine eares, against the stomache of my sense.”
The vivid noun has long enlivened the language of bankruptcy law. I turned to Eugene Wedoff of Chicago, a U.S. bankruptcy judge, who unearthed a 1948 Yale Law Review article by De Forest Billyou (what a great name for a lawyer) about the revision in 1935 of the Bankruptcy Act of 1898 “by enactment of the ‘cram-down’ provision.” Also, a 1944 decision of the Second Circuit referred to “the so-called cram-down provisions of Section 77 of the Act.” (There it goes again — the need of the dignified to dissociate themselves from colorful language with the modifier “so-called.”)
“As these references indicate,” Wedoff notes, “cram down originally meant imposing on creditors any treatment of their claims they had not accepted. Today, many debtors might choose to ‘cramdown’ the mortgage when the value of the mortgage debt exceeds the value of the house.”
This year’s proposed legislation would allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage loans for homeowners facing foreclosure, in effect imposing the revision on the less-than-popular lenders, much as Chaworth said in 1668, though only with the force of law and not with a sworde.
A spokesman for Senator Durbin, uncomfortable with the phrase that has gripped financial writers, says that “the term is used poorly. It’s pejorative.” What terminology would be the Durbin choice? “The senator prefers judicial modification,” the spokesman said. That is not exactly a grabber of a description; if the bill becomes law, let’s see how the practice is referred to in headlines and online.
WHEN PUSH COMES TO SHOVEL
In today’s catchword-happy world of budgetary bureaucrats, shovel-readiness is next to godliness. “Turnpike Has Own ‘Shovel Ready’ Projects” headlined the Web site of MetroNews of West Virginia two weeks ago about “the state’s ‘shovel ready’ list for the new federal economic stimulus package.”
Buyers of oven-ready turkeys and supporters of combat-ready troops were not quite ready-ready when Barack Obama told Tom Brokaw on “Meet the Press” after the 2008 election that he had met with governors and that “all of them have projects that are shovel-ready.” Subsequently, he said his nominees were readying “shovel-ready projects all across the country.”
When everyone hungry for federal largess began marching about with symbolic shovels on their shoulders, Manuel Roig-Franzia, a staff writer for The Washington Post, started the etymological hunt. This welcome new member of the Phrasedick Brigade found that Senator Hillary Clinton in November 2007 said during a conference call that 40 “shovel ready” projects were “all set to go in New York” and repeated the phrase in Albany two days later. The term had resonance in New York: the electric utility Niagara Mohawk began using it in the late 1990s, and the company, now named National Grid, bought the Internet domain name shovelready.com in 1998. An executive there proudly told The Post reporter that “we feel it has its origins in New York State.”
The earliest print use I can find is in The Worcester Telegram & Gazette of Massachusetts on Feb. 22, 1995, quoting State Representative Stephen Brewer: “Brewer noted that projects seeking approval from the state Board of Education have to be ‘shovel ready.’ That means plans must be drawn, environmental permits obtained, local approvals and money in hand and construction ready to start.” Citations antedating that usage are likely to turn up, but that’s the clear meaning in political minds.
The useful figure of speech is likely to be parodied, recalling as it does Ronald Reagan’s famously optimistic story dealing not with the act of shoveling but with what is being shoveled. Its punch line: “That means there’s got to be a pony in there someplace.”
William Safire, New York Times
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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25wwln-safire-t.html
