financial "bubble"

[Ben Zimmer]

My latest Wall St. Journal column (and Word Routes follow-up) is on
"bubble" in the financial sense:

http://on.wsj.com/bubblebz
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/the-bubble-that-keeps-on-bubbling/

Many sources give Jonathan Swift's "Bubble" poem (written Dec. 1720,
published Jan. 1721) as the first cite. I traced it back a year
earlier, to a Dec. 1719 item in Nathaniel Mist's Weekly Journal likely
written by Daniel Defoe. Also, in an update to the Word Routes column,
there's a 1700 cite for "speculative bubble" from Ned Ward that should
probably also count, even though it's a couple of decades before the
South Sea and Mississippi bubbles that Swift and Defoe wrote about.

I spoke about the history of the term on WNYC's "Leonard Lopate Show" yesterday:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2013/aug/27/language-columnist-ben-zimmer-bubble/

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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