Bazooka Hank and the Metaphors of Financial Crisis

From The Economist to the Bangkok Post, last week's most popular headline was "Nightmare on Wall Street." Journalists talked of "carnage," "panic," and "doom." A few even dared to whisper "crash." So all in all, it was a great week for financial metaphors.

As bubbles continued to burst, credit markets were frozen and financial giants were in meltdown. We learned that toxic bank assets had caused the nosedive on Wall Street, leading to the mother of all bailouts.

One of the more persistent metaphors to emerge from this financial crisis was fired off earlier in the summer by the U.S. Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson, Jr.:

In July, Congress gave [Paulson] authority to come to the aid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. "If you have a squirt gun in your pocket you may have to take it out. If you've got a bazooka, and people know you've got it, you may not have to take it out," Paulson said. (Translation: if the market knew the companies had a federal backstop, investors would be more likely to give them more time to work out their troubles.) Paulson was forced to use the bazooka sooner rather than later. By the end of August, the weakened financial state of the two giants was threatening both domestic mortgage markets and the value of hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of bonds they had issued that were owned by central banks around the world.
(Daniel Gross, "The Captain of the Street," Newsweek, September 20, 2008)

Used to describe a portable rocket launcher made famous in World War II, the word bazooka is a fairly fresh neologism. But it does have a history. The weapon in Hank Paulson's pocket took its name from a comical wind instrument invented and played by an Arkansas radio comedian, Bob Burns. In 1920, Burns took out a copyright on his bazooka--a cross between a kazoo and a miniature trombone with a funnel at the end.

Our best guess is that Burns's coinage was the result of compounding. In an article in American Speech (autumn 1994), lexicographer Robert Chapman identified "a mysterious affinity of kazoo with bazoo, and with bazooka" ("Clarity and Uncertainty About Bazooka"). Both kazoo and bazoo, Chapman observed, share a "prominent slang meaning": buttocks. Though "etymology can only be conjectured," he suggested that "a sort of analogy" exists "between the sound and tubularity of the kazoo and of the bowel tract."

We'll find out soon enough if Paulson's metaphorical bazooka is an effective weapon or merely a modified kazoo. In any case, for the sake of our savings, let's hope that he wasn't just talking out of his bazoo.

More About Metaphors:

• What Is a Metaphor?
• The Metaphors of Dr. Gregory House
• Using Similes and Metaphors to Enrich Our Writing

Image: Bob Burns playing his bazooka with the Silver Cornet Band. Source: NBC Publicity.