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crisis (late 15th century, from Latinised form of Greek krisis, “turning point in a disease”)

There’s always a crisis. Initially meaning a crisis in illness, it took until the middle of the 16th century for the word to take hold. Henry V’s “sickness” was described in 1548 as a crisis. By 1625, you could also have a “happy Crisis” and “sail forth into the haven of health”. Astrologers started to find the word useful around the same time and in 1663 the satirist Samuel Butler used it to mock them:

They’ll feel the pulses of the stars,
To find out agues, coughs, catarrhs;
And tell what crisis does divine
The rot in sheep, or mange in swine.

Political commentators got onto it by the mid-17th century with a “crisis of parliaments” and by 1715 you could have a crisis in church and state. John Stuart Mill, sounding modern in 1848, talked of a “commercial crisis when a great number of merchants and traders, at once, either have, or apprehend that they shall have, a difficulty in meeting their engagements”. Isn’t that what happened in 2008?

In the early days of its presence in English, it appears in various spellings: “crysis”, “chrisis” and “chrysis”, and “cresis”. The real fun comes in how to make it plural – and of course these days there is never just one crisis. In 1686 it came out as “crises’s”, 1715 as “crisises”, but it appears as “crises” by 1875.

Journalists were on to it as a useful half of a compound with the Times decrying “crisis-mongers” in 1841. In 1898 the Westminster Gazette claimed that the Tories were “crisis proof” (what about 2016?). Evelyn Waugh cynically claimed that “The crisis-minded always maintain that the problems of their decade are unique and insuperable”. By the 1960s, Switzerland was acknowledged as being a “normal haven for ‘crisis’ money” and by then, too, you could not only have “crisis-management” but also “crisis-management problems” which in theory, I think, could develop into a “crisis-management-crisis”.

It’s a very useful word and will, I’m sure, have lots of work to do in the coming months.