Hard times sometimes demand an expansion of our vocabulary.

Lynn Duncan, chief planner and community development director for Salem, Mass., spoke the other day about the "value engineering" that's going into a project her office is overseeing. What she meant is that every effort is being made to complete it as cheaply as possible.

It's similar to "lean engineering," a term popular in industry these days, which means doing the same or more with fewer resources. Those in government might want to try it sometime.

The federal government, too, plays with words used to describe the economy.

The Labor Department earlier this week reported that "core inflation" in April was up just 2.3 percent over the previous year. "Core inflation" in the rise in consumer prices excluding food and energy. When these essentials are factored in, the real inflation rate was 3.9 percent. The cost of groceries rose 1.5 percent in April over the previous month — the biggest jump in 15 years.

Of course, the nation's chief executive has been striving mightily to avoid using the "r-word" — recession — these days despite the many indications that the economy is in a deep trough. Perhaps he doesn't remember that he's already devised an alternative, which he unveiled in another slack time, the fall of 2002.

In an Oct. 4 speech in Boston in which he was making the case for more tax cuts, Bush said the economy was just "kind of ooching along." Maybe we're just in another "ooching" period.