What is the root cause of the financial crisis? “Lousy loans,” says Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel. We agree. And we like the phrase, especially because it provides a nice counterweight to that other double-L phrase, “liar loans,” which tends to blame the borrower. Warren’s phrase is a casual one, of course, but in some ways it is better than the language the press has tended to use to characterize the origins of the crisis. The fact is, of all the possible terms to describe these lousy loans, the press never found the right one. And as we’ll see, the lack of a single word—one easy-to-understand adjective to put in front of the word “loans” or “lending,” a word that would encapsulate the boiler-room culture that overran the mortgage industry—cost all of us plenty.

Instead of the right word, the press deployed another word—“subprime”—for reasons that are to some extent understandable, but unfortunate nonetheless. Unfortunate because “subprime” describes only the borrower, in unflattering terms, and has nothing to say about the lender.

That brings us to a secondary phrase: the less common but far more interesting “predatory lending.” Interesting because it both gets us closer to the heart of the problem, putting the focus on the lender, and yet still falls tragically short. Its rhetorical punch has given it staying power but has also hindered its broader acceptance by the press—leaving space for “subprime” to slip into ever more common usage and eventually to dominate the discourse.

Why is this crucial? Because when large segments of the business press dismissed the term “predatory lending,” they also dismissed the practice. The press had trouble understanding the crisis because it didn’t know how to talk—and thus how to think—about it.

Is this a tragedy? Well, we’ve got the numbers, we’ve read the stories behind them, and we promise to back up our claim that when “subprime” muscled aside “predatory” it had real-world consequences. But first we want to broaden this discussion a bit.

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