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The terms “recession” and “depression” were once used to suggest that a downturn was not as bad as a “panic” or “crisis.” In fact, for the first years of his presidency, Herbert Hoover chose to refer to the downturn as a “depression” in an effort to convey that what the country was experiencing was just a temporary indentation. Only in 1931 did Hoover begin to speak of a “Great Depression.”

Our current downturn has also been plagued by word games. Faced with the fear that the U.S. was about to suffer another “great depression,” commentators and economists revived the term “great recession” that had been used to describe the recession of 1982. The intent was to distinguish the current...