You've probably come across the term "wage hike" a lot lately, especially since California and 18 other states just increased the minimum wage.

"Wage hike" appears in headlines and articles everywhere: on Fox, CBS, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. The list goes on. When journalists use "wage hike," it is often inserted interchangeably with "wage increase." We do it here at KQED -- in our headlines, articles and on the air.

I was about to put the little phrase into a previous story about a fast food CEO who said rising minimum wages have been great for his business. I had already written "increase" about a half-dozen times and was grasping for a synonym. "Hike" was the first word that came to mind. But then I thought, why "hike"? What does that word actually mean? Why do journalists use it? Why not just write "increase"?

It is no surprise journalists have fallen in love with the phrase "wage hike," said Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press, the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary.

"'Hike' is a typical journalist word because it makes its copy punchier, it helps avoid redundancy and it fits better in a headline," Connor Martin said.

Originally, "hike" had nothing to do with economics. Connor Martin said the word emerged in early 19th century England as a verb for walking vigorously or laboriously. But before long, "hike" came to be used transitively with an object to mean moving, pulling or lifting something -- like hiking up a skirt or trousers.

The OED documents the first use of "hike" in reference to price in 1904, and it’s not used to tell a happy story. A reporter for the Topeka Capital newspaper wrote that a local store "hiked" ice cream prices from 5 to 10 cents. Bad news for ice cream buyers.

To find out how "hike" is used today, Connor Martin ran a scan of recent books and journalism to find words "hike" is often used to modify. She finds the most common word pairs almost all refer to things people generally do not want. The list includes things like tax hike, rate hike, fare hike, fuel price hike, fee hike and tuition hike, along with wage and pay hikes.

Geoff Nunberg, a linguist at the UC Berkeley School of Information, said, “When things hike, there is always the sense that things are being pulled up against their nature.” Using "hike," he said, implies some outside force is yanking up the trousers or skirts or wages.

Nunberg said hikes are imposed, they aren’t asked for or welcomed.

“You don’t go into your boss’s office and say, 'You know, I’ve been working here eight years, I feel I need a salary hike,'"
Nunberg said. "That implies there’s something unnatural about it.”

This is the problem when journalists use "hike," Nunberg said. It suggests raising minimum wages is unnatural, and that is editorializing. He said there is a better word out there: "increase."

"'Increase' is a neutral word,” Nunberg said, “Things can increase for the better or for the worse. When you want to emphasize the positive effects of a raise or increase, you don’t use 'hike.'”

Nunberg calls the word "hike" particularly pernicious because no one notices it. It blends in to what he calls the “linguistic wallpaper.”

He said that the next time I report on the minimum wage, I should stick to the totally neutral word "increase" and save "hike" for stories about trousers and vigorous walks.