Recycling recessions

This quarter's revised and updated words from the OED cover the alphabetical range rean to recyclist, originally published under Sir William Craigie's editorship one hundred and five years ago in 1904.

I've noted from time to time that the end-words of these ranges can often be quite obscure. As it happens, the final entries in the present range are perfectly familiar and deal with the topical issue of recycling. But the opening word, true to form, will be unfamiliar to most users: rean is a regional term for ‘a deep furrow used for conducting drainage water from a field or other piece of ground’. But as you can see from the definition, even reans appear to contribute to the recycling effort.

When Dr Craigie reviewed this and adjacent ranges in 1904 he was fairly subdued in his enthusiasm:

“The very abstract sense of some of these words (as receive, recover) causes considerable difficulty of arrangement, which is sometimes increased by the large number of obsolete uses which have to be recorded, as in the case of redound, redress, reduce. Formations of the type readapt, readdress, readhere, etc., are numerous, but seldom of special interest.”

Sir William's ‘prefatory notes’ for the range, along with the prefaces for other sections of the First Edition of the dictionary, have been available for some years as Dispatches from the Front (UW Centre for the New OED, 1987), edited by Dr Darrell Raymond, formerly of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Dr Raymond has kindly supplemented and reformatted his text for online access, and these prefaces are now available at the OED site (Archived documents).

It is possible to regard the re- words in this range as a rather repetitive set of terms. As we move out of rea- most of the borrowings are of Romance, rather than Germanic origin. But a brief summary shows that as well as the simple terms for which Craigie felt no great warmth, there is a wide range of everyday words we're all familiar with:

reap, rear, reason, reasonable, rebel, rebellion, rebellious, rebuke, rebut, recalcitrant, recall, recant, recapitulation, recede, receipt, receive, receiver, recent, receptacle, reception, receptive, receptor, recess, recession, recessive, recharge, recidivist, recipe, recipient, reciprocal, reciprocate, recital, recitation, recite, reck, reckless, reckon, reclaim, recline, recluse, reclusive, recognition, recognizance, recognize, recoil, recollect, recollection, recommence, recommend, recompense, reconcile, recondite, reconnaissance, reconnoitre, reconsider, reconstitute, reconstruct, record, recorder, recording, recount, recoup, recourse, recover, recovery, recreant, recreate, recreation, recrimination, recruit, rectangle, rectangular, rectify, rectilinear, rectitude, recto, rector, rectory, recumbent, recuperate, recur, recurrent, recursion, recursive, recusant, recycle.

Buried deep in the preceding list is another word which has been in the news headlines recently: recession. This is a word which entered English from Latin in the seventeenth century. OED1 (in 1904) presented the word in a rather straightforward light. The earliest evidence for recession in a number of senses clustered around the 1650s. The definitions were given in a solid logical order, roughly:

1. The action of receding (in literal contexts)
   1. from a place (a1652-)
   2. with reference to receding surfaces or outlines (1753-)
   3. in time (1646-)
   4. (Philology) the transference of accentuation to or towards the first syllable (1886-)
2. Various transferred or figurative senses (1647-)
3. The departure of something from the location at which it exists (1659-)
4. A temporary economic decline (1929-)

A new look at the evidence for the word today offers a rather different view. In the early seventeenth century recession was beginning to take on some of the meanings of the older noun recess. In fact the first time we meet recession, in 1606, it means ‘a temporary suspension of work or activity’ (equivalent to sense 5 of recess, which was well attested in the language). This sense, however, does not show any longevity in English, and by the mid seventeenth century we are reverting to using recess here again.

At roughly the same time (around 1608) we find records of a new sense. In this case recession is mainly used in medical contexts, in the sense of ‘the relief or remission of a disease, etc.’, or ‘the decline of a function’. As Charles Bisset remarked in 1762, in his Essay on the Medical Constitution of Great Britain:

“A long uniform course of warm or sultry weather..occasions a general recession of the inflammatory disposition.”

Soon afterwards (1614) the meaning of recession broadened to include any action (or act) of departing from a state, standard, or even mindset:

“All this” [said Dr Johnson] “is a..temporary recession from the realities of life to airy fictions.”

It is not until 1630 that we have a record of recession in the physical sense of receding or moving away, first from a point, and then (1646) with reference to time:

“Has there really been a recession of the seasons, so that summer comes later every year?” (Mortimer Collins)

Alongside these general senses, illustrating physical receding, we now start to find specialist meanings: in astronomy (where recession is used to mean ‘precession’: 1682-); in physical geography (the withdrawal of sea from a shoreline, etc.: 1746-); especially in dentistry and surgery (movement of part of the body away from its normal position: 1827-); in phonetics (movement of accentuation towards the front of a word: 1855-); in religion: a return procession (1868-); and again in astronomy (the motion of a celestial body away from the earth: 1871-).

A further branch of meaning becomes evident in the eighteenth century. In 1753 William Hogarth wrote that “planes or flat surfaces..have their appearances of recession perfected by the first species of retiring shades”. In so doing he was perhaps heralding in a new meaning for recession (‘the effect or fact of being recessed, especially in architectural design or artistic representation’). By 1799 a recession could also be a cavity or depression (as in a rock or coastline).

In general, recess itself had served for most of these meanings in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. We can see the inroads made by recession in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the balance between recess and recession underwent a profound shift.

The most familiar meaning of recession is the economic one. The first glimmerings of this date from the mid nineteenth century, when the Guardian (1847) wrote “as is usual when a recession of price succeeds a series of advances, the amount of business done was under average”. This meaning (‘a reduction in value or amount’) flourished, but it is not equivalent to the modern sense ‘a period of economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced’. OED1/2 dated this use from 1929, when the Economist, on the eve of the Great Depression, worried about the prospect of having to face “an immediate recession of some magnitude”. For OED3 we have found the sense being used (in a regional American newspaper) in 1905, of the short, sharp recession of 1903, when (as we might recognize) “the bottom was knocked out of the speculative craze which had seized the country”.