While The Wall Street Journal is still beating the credit crisis story to death (see today’s foreboding piece on the “widening array of financial-market problems”) we were heartened to see an unusual glimpse of levity within its pages: this amusing piece on how America's captains of industry are adopting, well, quite frankly, sailor talk in their efforts to describe the financial travails they’re weathering.

At a Goldman Sachs conference in December, G. Kennedy Thompson, chairman and chief executive officer of Wachovia Corp., informed investors that the bank and its competitors were facing "headwinds."

An audience member asked the logical question: "So, how big a headwind should we think about in '08?"

"Well, right now, it's a big headwind," Mr. Thompson replied.

As the U.S. economy slows, chief executives and chief financial officers have taken to slinging around a word more commonly heard on the decks of ships. To hear executives tell it, headwinds are to blame for the weak sales of cars, tires, paint and books. Just what are these headwinds? Everything from high fuel prices to slow foot traffic in handbag stores to rising newsprint costs.

On Jan. 17, Rick Wagoner, chief executive officer of General Motors Corp., told auto analysts at a New York conference to brace themselves for unfavorable conditions. "As we look out, we've got to be realistic [that] we are facing some tough headwinds, particularly here in the U.S. with a relatively weak industry."

Late last month, Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang presented a gloomy revenue outlook for the Internet company. "We're executing aggressively against our strategic priorities, and our clear focus is starting to bear fruit," he told analysts. "While we continue to face headwinds, we expect our positive momentum to build this year."

Heather Reisman, chief executive of Indigo Books & Music, recently said the Canadian retailer had faced "headwinds" on several fronts. One of them, she said, was the weather itself.

The dictionary defines headwind as "a wind having the opposite general direction to a course of movement." Sailboats cannot move directly into such a wind -- they must tack back and forth at an angle to it, which slows their progress.

George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at University of California at Berkeley, says it makes sense that corporations have embraced the term. For years, he says, people have used metaphors based on natural phenomena when they run into trouble and don't want to be criticized. They blame "the winds of change," or say they cannot stem "the tide of history."

Weather terms appeal to economists and corporate executives because the market sometimes seems to behave like a force of nature. These days, Mr. Lakoff says, citing headwinds seems to be a way to duck blame for all kinds of business problems related to the subprime mortgage crisis, the credit crunch, even simple bad business decisions.

(Continue reading on The Wall Street Journal)

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