Word of the week: Bezzle

A famous economist coined the word almost 70 years ago. It's never been more timely.

Cory Doctorow just keeps embiggening my vocabulary. First there was enshittification — the American Dialect Society’s word of the year for 2023 — which Doctorow recently evolved into enshittocene (the shitty era we’re living in) and the great enshittening (ditto). (See the text of Doctorow’s Marshall McLuhan lecture, delivered in January as the Transmediale festival in Berlin.)

Now comes bezzle, which happens to appear in the title of Doctorow’s latest novel. The Bezzle is the latest in Doctorow’s series of tech-savvy crime novels starring the 60-something forensic accountant Marty Hench — yes, I said “60-something forensic accountant,” and isn’t “Marty Hench” a perfect character name?

“The Bezzle,” by Cory Doctorow, on sale February 20.

Doctorow didn’t coin bezzle, but I’m hoping his book brings it the widespread admiration it deserves. The word was the invention, or truncation, of John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006), the Canadian-American economist and diplomat who taught at Harvard, published prolifically, and served as JFK’s ambassador to India. Here’s how he introduced bezzle in his 1955 book The Great Crash, 1929:

At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.

This bezzle is not to be confused with bezel, the groove in which a gemstone or watch face is set. Bezzle is derived from embezzle, “to make away with money or property of another” — the white-collar word for “steal.”¹ It came into English, in the early 15th century, from Anglo-French enbesiler “to steal, cause to disappear.”

The 2024 equivalent, Doctorow writes, is cryptocurrency:

Remember that cryptocurrency is a faith-based initiative whose mechanism is: “convince normies that shitcoins will be worth more tomorrow than they are today, and then trade them the shitcoins that cost you nothing to create for dollars that they worked hard to earn.”

In other words, crypto is a bezzle, defined by John Kenneth Galbraith as “The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.”

Shitcoin is good, too!

Read an excerpt from The Bezzle.

And as long as we’re talking about confidence tricksters, how about those $399 gilded sneakers being peddled by a certain sexual predator and insurrection abettor? If you fell for Trump Steaks and Trump University, you’re definitely the target sucker for these grotesque kicks. How fitting that the former Conman-in-Chief introduced them at SneakerCon.

1. I once worked with (not for) a chief financial officer who got arrested for embezzling money from our employer. It was quite a shock, because the guy was a Mormon who always had impressed everyone as the straightest of straight arrows. Mouths to feed, I guess.