The Crash

A fictional historical event, created by the Nix Notional Network's History Channel in order to test the man on the street's knowledge of history. Their presenter Jesseca Schwing went around several cities interviewing members of the public. Questions included:

• What were you doing when you heard about The Crash?
• What are you doing to remember The Crash? (ten, thirty, fifty or one hundred years later)
• Do you think The Crash still influences the government's policy making?
• Do you think that we would be any more prepared, were The Crash to happen today?

An astonishing 38% of those interviewed attempted to bluff, making vague statements to imply that they knew what she was talking about.

In addition to the public questioning, she also asked a number of presidential candidates questions about whether they believed voters were more concerned about party policies after The Crash, and whether they thought things would have gone differently if they'd been in power back then. Every candidate responded that they would have handled the crisis better, but using vague terms in an effort to avoid revealing that they didn't know the term.

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Now, The Crash has come into use in Shadowtalk as a metasyntactic variable; some significant but unspecified event. For example "Our taxes have gone up a lot since The Crash." could mean that the government has gone up as a result of some event, but that the speaker is only interested in talking about the tax rise and not what caused it.