Just a phrase we're going through.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FINE PRINT - Real estate industry

Every market, be it bear or bull, seems to generate a catchphrase that eventually comes to encapsulate the mojo of the moment. In late 1996, for example, after Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan wondered if "irrational exuberance" hadn't artificially inflated asset values, that expression became the stand-in reference to the tech-driven stock bubble that dominated the decade--as well as the title of a book, orchestral symphony and series of paintings. Going further back, we had "greed is good" and "brother, can you spare a dime," referring to the up and down markets of the 1980s and 1930s, respectively.

It's early yet, but I have a catch-phrase nominee for the historic downturn through which we're all now suffering and will surely continue to do so until the slapdash tinkerings with the economic machinery some how pay off: "secular headwinds."

It's a peculiar idiom, in that "secular" is typically used to identify something as nonreligious--and God knows (cue rimshot) there's nothing particularly spiritual about a headwind in the first place. But if you read far enough into the dictionary's assemblage of definitions for the word, you realize it also refers to anything that spans the ages. Thus "secular" is simply a fancy way of saying "essentially permanent," meaning that when a chief executive officer invokes the phrase--as my old boss McClatchy Newspapers CEO Gary Pruitt is prone to do--it's not a lament so much as a confession: "We failed to see the world has changed."

A quick (and admittedly cursory) online search of the phrase shows it apparently was first uttered in 2002 on CNN's Moneyline. But that same search showed a mushrooming use of it in 2008, as the economy headed south and corporate leaders and business reporters sought to explain plunging earnings. Everyone was facing headwinds, and the only question was whether they were cyclical or secular. That distinction is debated with Talmudic precision. It just so happens that a couple of companies in my neighborhood demonstrate the crucial difference between the two, which can be summarized this way: Battling a cyclical headwind means you'll live to sell another day, while a secular headwind means you're a corpse--albeit one probably still warm.

Chapel Hill-based Investors Title Co., which sells real-estate title insurance, was trading at $50 a share this time last year. These days, it hovers in the low $20s, has reduced its staff and seen a 2007 profit of more than $8.4...