Why GFC explains everything (to Australians)

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This morning an email from a client mentioned the GFC. Earlier this week another client was talking about the GEC (which has the advantage that you can pronounce it, while GFC has to be spelled out).

When this morning I Twittered about how we have a new acronym that doesn’t need to be explained, I got some interesting responses. @ITSinsider in America said that she had heard it before from someone else in Australia. An Australian initially thought I meant Geelong Football Club, so googled it to find out.

Which gives very interesting results…

If you Google “GFC” in Australia the #3 result is a newspaper story Tough week ends in talk of ‘GFC’, dated from October last year, with four of the top 10 results referring to the planet’s economic woes, including three newspaper headlines.

If you Google “GFC” in the US, aside from a #5 entry from Wikipedia which includes various acronyms including the contemporary one, the first entry which refers to GFC in this way is at #45.

So are Australians particularly acronym-crazy? Are we in the vanguard of what will be a global trend to summarize the state of the world as GFC?

Of course the very best thing about GFC is that it is an easy explanation for everything, in three easy letters. It was all getting very complicated for a while. Now it’s simple again – yay!