If this past week’s wave after wave of daily sell-offs wasn’t a stock market crash, it sure resembled one. But that “c-word” was scarcely uttered, mainly for psychological benefit:

A crash is commonly defined as a 20 percent decline in a single day or several days. The drop over the seven days ending Thursday lopped 20.9 percent off the Dow Jones industrial average, which would qualify as a crash. On Friday, the Dow fell again, bringing the cumulative loss to 22 percent…

“Nobody wants to be blamed for making things worse than they are,” said Edward Yardeni, who runs his own economic research firm. “You can probably watch CNBC all day and find that almost no one used the word `crash’ or `depression.’ You’ll see it more often. It is a stock market crash and it has the potential to create a depression.”

The word “crash” is so linked to the market’s 1929 plunge and the images of bread lines, shantytowns and hungry children in the ensuing Great Depression that some investors hesitate to use it even to describe 1929.

It’s morbidly funny how much such critical components of socio-economic well-being are tied to semantics. This is in the same category as avoiding the labels “recession” or “depression”.