Bailout: Merriam-Webster's Metaphorical Word of the Year

According to John Morse, president of Merriam-Webster, bailout has been looked up so often in his company's online dictionary that it was the obvious choice for the 2008 Word of the Year. "People seem to have a general understanding of the word bailout," he said, "but they seem to want to better understand its application, any connotations it may have and shades of meaning."

Unfortunately, "a general understanding of the word" is about all the concise dictionary entry has to offer:

Main Entry: bail·out
Pronunciation: \bā-laut\
Function: noun
Date: 1951
a rescue from financial distress

As a public service to those still seeking clues to the connotations of bailout and its finer shades of meaning, we offer a few notes on the possible etymology of Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2008. But whether these jottings contribute to a deeper understanding of the popular metaphor, you'll have to decide.

• The word bail comes from the Middle English word for "bucket" and means "to remove water from a boat by repeatedly filling a container and emptying it over the side." A memorable account of this often futile activity was provided by journalist Henry Ward in the article "Heroes of the Deep," published in The Century Magazine in July 1898:

  Ever drenched, ever bailing for dear life, in momentary peril of capsizing, becoming more numbed and discouraged, drifting farther from land, falling off, into deeper troughs of the heaving seas, the poor men finally gave up hope; for survival was only a question of minutes, or, at most, of hours.

  But of course this rather desperate sense of bail has little to do with the sort of bailing out that's been going on in Washington for the past few months. Right?



• Another sort of emptying out or escape is implied by the verb bail out (or in British spelling, bale out): to parachute from an aircraft, or--by extension--to abandon a project or enterprise. After all, if the plane is going to crash anyway, bailing out in this sense is simply an act of self-preservation. So let's move on quickly.



• There's a different kind of bail (same spelling, but derived from an Old French word for "deliver") that refers to money exchanged for the release of an arrested person as a guarantee of that individual's appearance for trial. But this sense of the word also seems disconnected from current events. After all, though trillions of dollars in bank holdings and retirement savings have been lost in the past few months, we've been repeatedly assured that "No laws were broken" and "Nobody is going to jail."



• This may be a stretch, but let's also make note of the homonym bale (from a Slavic word meaning "sick person"), which is defined as "great evil" or "anguish." Sure, we've heard countless tales of woe lately and much talk about suffering: the suffering stock market, the suffering auto industry, suffering financial institutions, and, at the bottom, suffering consumers. But surely a bailout is meant to relieve such anguish. And besides, a bailout is rarely described as a great evil. From what we hear, it's only a necessary evil.

So much for etymology. It's clear that the job of explaining bailout is probably best left to economists, not lexicographers or rhetoricians. All we can do is draw some small comfort from an old Icelandic proverb: "When bale is highest, boot is nighest." Or, as Henry Paulson might put it, "When things have come to the worst, help is most likely to be at hand."

More About Words of the Year:

• The American Dialect Society's Words of the Year
• Hype and Hypermiling: Oxford's 2008 Word of the Year
• More Nincompoopery: Words of the Year for 2007