Tuesday, December 16, 2008

"Made-Off With My Money" Unlikely to Supplant "Ponzi Scheme"

The ANNOTICO Report

 

Although Bernard Madoff's Fraud was at least $ 50 BILLION  so far, about ONE THOUSAND times more than Charles Ponzi whose NET take was 7 Million, Ponzi is likely to retain his Infamy.

 

Madoff is not nearly as euphonious, melodious, or mellifluous as Ponzi, BUT "Made Off with My Money" has a certain pictorial impact.

 

Madoff Unlikely to Oust Ponzi in Lingo

 

Reuters  News 

By Phil Wahba

Monday December 15, 2008

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bernard Madoff may have to wait awhile before his name becomes a term in the popular lexicon and bumps off "Ponzi", which has become shorthand for financial fraud.

Madoff's name is already being used for puns, such as "He Made-off with my money", following his arrest last week on fraud charges in what investigators said was a "Ponzi" scheme that cost his investors $50 billion.

But despite the relevance of his name to his alleged crime, "Madoff" is up against a strong incumbent if it is to become part of the American vernacular and earn a spot in the country's dictionaries.

"A word has to become a naturalized citizen of our vocabulary," said Peter Sokolowski, an editor at Springfield, Mass.-based dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster.

That means it has to be used plenty, far and wide, and for a long time, he said. Merriam-Webster editors spend one hour of every day scouring periodicals, books, and journals to decide if a word is popular enough for inclusion in the dictionary.

"It (Madoff) could become a word real quickly, but whether it gets into the dictionary depends on its staying power," Sokolowski said.

Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant whose scam in the 1920s drew in about 40,000 investors and $15 million with the promise of high returns quickly, has become synonymous with schemes in which money from later investors is used to pay off earlier investors.

Although "Ponzi" is now a well known term in North America but relatively unknown outside the region, the name only entered Merriam-Webster in 1983, 24 years after his death.

Several more recent words have caught on like wildfire and been adopted quickly by Merriam-Webster.

Blog, for example, emerged in 1999 as the amalgamation of "web" and "log" and by 2004 was already in the dictionary.

For "Madoff" to be as successful, it would have to become a generic term for financial malfeasance and displace "Ponzi", said Sokolowski. But first-mover words in the English language are hard to dislodge....

"In the case of 'Madoff', it's dubious," he said. "Because we've already got a strong word,'Ponzi'."

 

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