Money talks, but in a good economy, it tends to do so using signs and symbols like cars and clothes and real estate. When times get hard, though, money loses its mouthpieces, and people must speak out loud about their finances, using actual words. “My 401(k) is in the toilet.” “I can’t believe I’m about to pay four bucks for a glorified cup of coffee.” “I used to dream about retiring, but now all I dream about is keeping my cable.” Talk may be cheap, but when the markets are falling, prices are rising and credit is tightening, it’s a uniquely affordable indulgence.
My grandfather told me it would be this way. He was a child of the Depression. That fabled period, the way he talked about it, had a twofold effect on his family and friends: it laid them low financially while drawing them closer personally. The agent of this coziness was language. As he described it for me when I was small and had no interest in his reminiscences other than the present I might get for indulging them, the Depression caused people to huddle around the radio, listening to speeches by F.D.R., after which they’d sit out on the porch and chat with one another and the neighbors. During one of these chats, he reported, he warned his father not to sell his ragged stock portfolio because the economy would come back someday. As it happened, his father didn’t heed my grandfather, but the crux of the story wasn’t poor market strategy but the fact that, during the Depression, conversation among kinfolk flowed in a way that it no longer does.
Full Story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/magazine/09wwln-lede-t.html?fta=y
