’Tis the season? We’ve not yet had the pleasure of the Lord Mayor’s Show but already I’ve had my first meal of sprats* and the first Word of the Year has been sighted. It is from the Oxford University Press, whose annual publication on words in the news by Susie Dent came out on Thursday. You will have no difficulty guessing the area of life from which this year’s word has been drawn: the current financial crisis. Ms Dent has gone for the obvious, out of a dozen or more terms that have become all too familiar to us in recent months — she’s chosen credit crunch. As she points out, it isn’t even a recent invention, since it was ...