A friend told me about a teacher she knows, who has just asked her class to give a little talk on the subject of “shopping”. When it came to the turn of one small boy, he said: “We were going to go shopping but we didn't because daddy said we couldn't. My daddy works for Lehman Brothers. He doesn't now.”

Lexical legend

What did you do in the Credit Crunch, daddy? Like “Wall Street crash”, the expression “credit crunch” is becoming an umbrella term for everything associated with the present crisis, and maybe the coming recession too. It's simple, memorable, and usefully fudges distinctions that people who actually understand these things might want to quibble about. Ah, the power of alliteration in media shorthand.

But who coined the phrase? I've been checking on Google, and found nearly 11 million references, almost all from the past 12 months: a sudden explosion of usage into daily currency in the news media and the bus queue. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which added it to the lexicon last month, tells me that the first use it can establish was in the Los Angeles Times in 1966, in different circumstances, of course. Thereafter there was a trickle of usage, mostly among experts. Then, in 2007, from nearly zero came our own Big Bang of instances. At that point of detonation stands not only a series of economic events, but quite probably one man or woman - almost certainly American, and maybe unaware of his or her own instrumentality - who sparked the verbal explosion by applying the phrase to the events of the hour.

The rest of us journalists have missed our moment. Too late, now, for Mortgage Meltdown, Sub-prime Spasm, Borrowing Bust, Banking Balls-up, Debt Disaster, or Lending Limbo.

Corporate challenge

Crisis? What crisis? I'm looking forward to catching out BBC newscasters and editors using that word. From tomorrow there is to be a corporation-wide ban on broadcast references to any “economic crisis” when discussing what our Government might prefer to call the “global financial challenge”. In place of “crisis” BBC staff have apparently been instructed to say “downturn” - the same word, incidentally, that Cabinet ministers are pointedly employing in place of “recession” or even “coming recession”. Friday is D (for Downturn) Day in corporation-speak.

Desert downturn

In the deserts of Mongolia and northern China the wild Bactrian camel faces a crisis (downturn?) of its own, on the very edge of extinction. However, hope remains for the last few hundred of the eighth-most endangered species on Earth, driven into desolate places where they have learnt to drink salt water and somehow survived even nuclear testing.

My members' newsletter from the Wild Camel Protection Foundation (www.wildcamels.com) announces remarkable results from scientific analysis in Vienna. This establishes definitively for the first time that the wild Bactrian camel is not just genetically distinct from the domestic camel, but sharply so. And the Chinese Government, in an enlightened response to world interest, has agreed to establish for the camels a 155,000sq km zone called the Lop Nur National Nature Reserve, in Xinjiang, while the Mongolian Ministry of Nature is looking at the possibility of releasing a small herd back into their ancient habitat in the Gobi Desert.

The WCPF desperately need funds for a captive breeding programme, and (to locate surviving beasts) a helicopter survey of vast, hostile terrain. Join me. Spit in the face of the credit crunch/mortgage meltdown/ sub-prime spasm, etc, and send them a few quid. Let's turn Bactrian bust to Bactrian boom. This is the camel crunch - sorry, downturn.

Shifting sands

On Tuesday I did one of the weirdest new things I have done. For “The Shift”, a new series starting on these pages soon. I tried driving a virtual bus in a bus simulator at Willesden Junction. Incredibly realistic. I negotiated a whole virtual town, hitting the kerb and narrowly missing several cyclists and a taxi. Afterwards I was nearly sick.

Wondering yesterday whether The Times's Alice Miles, who is organising the series, would mind a premention of the episode in this diary, I texted to ask. Her reply: “Am in gas mask. Bed bug. Pest control.”

Bed bugs are ghastly: I know, from an African boyhood. Sorry for Alice and her little girl, and admiring her honesty in speaking about this, I texted my sympathies on her domestic vermin... er, downturn. To ease her embarrassment I made candid mention of my own bedbug experiences.

Her reply was swift: “Is work! Doing Shift.”

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