WebProNews

It should be the Frau Blucher of words and if we believe in that marketing genius that was "The Secret" we shouldn't dare throw it out there. Nonetheless, the braver the media gets at using the "r" word, the more people are searching for it.

Thus, they're all putting the energy out there like seeds and are waiting to reap the harvest.

Recession. There, I said it, now let's get on with it.

Yahoo's Molly McCall at The Buzz Log reports that Yahoo searches have spiked in the past week regarding that rather unpleasant term. See, put it out there it just grows.

She writes:

"Over the past seven days, searchers propelled queries on 'economic recession' and 'recession' upwards. Lookups like 'last u.s. recession' and 'recession proof jobs' spiked. Even 'stagflation'—a term not normally found strolling the Buzz aisles—more than doubled its numbers."

The phrase "definition of a recession economy" is up 500%; "what is a recession" is up 260%.

Concern, according to McCall's color-coded map, is heaviest in places you might expect, where the real financial centers are like New York, Illinois, and California. Strangely, the recession-related searches are extra-heavy in Tennessee, too.

As the for square states, the nobody-lives-there states, and the-economy's-always-bad-anyway states, they don't seem to be all that alarmed.

Maybe we should try an experiment. Everybody think super hard about economic expansion, repeat the words, and then go search for it. Maybe The Secret works.