To Enron’s enormous legal and financial nightmares, add this indignity: The bankrupt behemoth’s name has morphed into slang for slippery accounting, leaving employees in the lurch and other unsavory conduct.
It is now possible to enron people, to be enronish and to practice Enronomics.
“We’ve seen ugly, enronish sights before,” Jane Bryant Quinn, for example, wrote in Newsweek recently, referring to other failed businesses whose employees lost out because their retirement funds were heavy on company stock.
“It seems like there are new Enron words coming down every day,” said Paul McFedries, a computer expert and veteran word watcher whose Word Spy Web site tracks the use of new terms.
McFedries also has spotted references in the popular press to “enronizing” employees, to a “failure of Enronian proportion” (defeat in a football game) and “Enronistas,” used to mean arrogant Enron executives who played fast and loose with the rules.
So far, the most prominent use of Enron, the verb, belongs to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).
“I don’t want to Enron the people of the United States,” Daschle said in criticizing the Bush administration tax cuts. “I don’t want to see them holding the bag at the end of the day just like Enron employees have held the bag.” He also accused the Bush administration of “Enronizing” the economy.
That immediately raised the hackles of Republicans, who rejected the comparison and recognized a potentially damaging shorthand phrase the minute they heard it.
Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) decided to fight the derogatory new verb with one of his own.
“When Sen. Daschle uses a term like that, I don’t think that’s a good way to start off the new year,” Lott said Sunday on CBS. “And we don’t want to `Daschle-ize’ the budget, which means raise taxes, increase spending and obstruct.”
Whatever the merits of their respective arguments, Lott faces a linguistic hurdle in pressing his “Daschle-ize” rhetoric that Daschle himself does not.
“Daschle-ize” is hard to say, hard to spell. “To enron” has the ring of a more plausible word, one with the heft of a national scandal. People may not be sure whether to capitalize the E or leave it lower case, but, either way, it is easy to say. It is easy to convert into other parts of speech: enronish and enronian and enronially, for example. And it is easy to adapt to word play, such as the New York Post headline, “The Enron-Around.”
“It’s two syllables and it’s almost like a linguistic Rorschach test,” McFedries said. “People can project those syllables onto whatever they want. So it’s easier than with, say, `Whitewater,’ where it’s longer. And those are two words that have their own meanings, so it’s harder to project meanings onto them and create words out of them.”
After Watergate and all the “something-gates” it spawned (“nannygate,” “travelgate,” “Irangate”) McFedries finds the enron terms a breath of fresh air, semantically speaking.
“The `gate’ thing is so boring now,” he said. “Whenever a scandal comes up, people just slap `gate’ on the end. This is more fun.”
But will the Enron terms have linguistic legs, as “gate” does?
“I think it really depends on how much people end up understanding the issues that underlie the whole scandal,” McFedries said. “So much of it is so complex.”
But one element of the scandal that registers loud and clear with people is the specter of people at the top of the corporation twisting rules to their advantage as lower level employees got squeezed. Another is the shredding of documents.
“If that’s what they end up remembering, then I think it has a chance,” McFedries said.
He placed worse odds on “Enronomics,” reminiscent of “Reaganomics,” sticking.
“The Democrats have been pushing that but what does it really mean?” McFedries said. “They’re trying to associate it with the Bush government giving back a lot of taxes, and fuzzy accounting. It may be too political to last.”
