That’s Wall Street slang for job loss, the kind we are being warned about as we stand on the beach awaiting the tsunami most financial analysts say is coming unless Congress acts quickly to pour oil on the roiling waters of the credit crisis. (I know, roiling waters don’t make waves, and you can’t really see a tsunami coming, but bear with me.) As CNN’s Ali Velshi, one of the calmer prophets of doom, explained it this morning, dislocation is one of those nice Orwellian words that brings to mind Reagan’s explanation of the difference between a recession and a depression: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours.”

Given the loss of 600,000 jobs this year, what’s a few more? The one person most Americans now agree should be out of work is the cat with top job: According to an ABC poll released yesterday, 70 percent of Americans now disapprove of the job Bush is doing, a historic low. It’s nice that we can all agree on something! It was also nice to read yesterday that Alberto Gonzalez can’t get a steady gig since resigning as AG. See you in the soup line, boys. 

But how could you lose your job, you say? You can still locate it, most days. The failure of this current bill seems to be not simply one of imagination (a lot of voters, who crashed Congress’s email server yesterday, cannot imagine massive unemployment and the other hallmarks of the 30 percent decline in the economy that defines depression) but of language: Calling it a “bailout” makes it sound like we’re rescuing Wall Street when, if you believe nearly every economist in the country, we are rescuing ourselves. 

The first time I visited Wall Street I was amazed to find, right around the corner from some of the biggest investment firms in the country, an old-fashioned street vendor hustling wind-up monkeys on the sidewalk. As booms and busts have occurred since, I have watched in amazement as giants like the Solomon Brothers and Bear Stearns have teetered and fell. But that guy — maybe you’ve seen him in Union Square, hustling vegetable peelers, three-piece suit, Australian accent? — is still on the job, which is to say: on the street. And I don’t mean Wall Street, either.