As the Americans on this board know, we are headed toward a "fiscal cliff" here in the U.S. unless the "esteemed" legislators make some moves. However, from a linguistic perspective, there was an interesting discussion of it in the Chicago Tribune :
quote:
We were aware that "fiscal cliff" was an old term revived last winter by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Thus we were amused to read in Sunday's Tribune that the American Dialectic Society has tracked the phrase to a 1957 New York Times article about homeownership. But our buttons then burst to learn of the society's discovery that the fiscal cliff's older (and in our immodest view much classier) brother, the "fiscal precipice," had appeared in ... an 1893 Chicago Tribune editorial about the gold standard.
This being Christmas, please be generous and forgive us our sin of pride.
