2008 a year for change

Word reflects Obama promise, financial crisis

By Deborah Hastings ASSOCIATED PRESS | Wednesday, December 31, 2008

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All year long, the word was everywhere. It was something we could believe in. It was something that mattered. But by the end of 2008, it was not, most definitely, richly jingling in our pockets.

The word was "change." It was what we craved, what we feared, what we endured.

After a long, long campaign, America elected its first black president. And it was Barack Obama, a senator from Illinois whose father hailed from Kenya, who first pounded the word into a drumbeat that echoed far beyond politics. In any other year, that victory would have stood alone as a chapter in history.

But this was not any other year.

This was a year when many other words were plucked from the dictionary to join vocabularies stretched to the breaking point by a daily drumbeat of surprises.

Some were good: "Phelpsian," the adjective coined to describe gold-medalist swimmer Michael Phelps' feat at the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

But most reflected bewilderment and alarm -- words like "bailout" and "financial meltdown."

Global stock markets plunged -- and then plunged some more. Stately institutions like Lehman Brothers simply disappeared. Retirement funds vanished, erasing the dreams of people who'd hoped to stop working in their golden years or to send their children to college or to someday buy their own home.

Mortgages -- specifically, unpaid mortgages -- were the locomotive pulling a downbound economic train. Years of easy money had prompted banks to give loans to folks who were credit risks, and in 2008 that trend kindled a meltdown of mammoth proportions -- a worldwide meltdown caused by the intricate -- and baffling -- selling and reselling of mortgage debt.

The end result for the homeowner was foreclosure, and Americans suffered greatly. By the end of the third quarter, one in 10 mortgage holders was in foreclosure or delinquent in payments - a 76 percent increase from the previous year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

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