Bill Bryson is great with anecdotes, but somewhat lazy with research. In the opening chapter of Mother Tongue, he sets out to show that the wealth of words a language has to describe a particular object or concept can tell us something about its cultural significance. “Every language has areas in which it needs, for practical purposes, to be more expressive than others,” he writes. But the examples he offers are naff. For instance, he tells us that the French don’t have a word for ‘gentleman’ (‘gentilhomme’) and that French grammar can’t distinguish between ‘I wrote’ (‘J’écrivis’ in the past historic tense) and ‘I have written’ (‘J’ai écrit’).

But there’s one word the French have for which I can’t find an equivalent in English – and which potentially tells us a lot about different values from one side of the channel to the other.

It’s ‘décroissance’, which translates roughly and ungracefully as ‘un-growth’.

In 2008, Courier International published a special on ‘décroissance’ with only these words emblazoned on the cover: “Travailler moins pour gagner moins et vivre mieux” – or ‘Work less to earn less and live better’.

The idea goes beyond the bleak realms of zero growth – into greener meadows where working less means investing more in building communities, keeping healthy, eating good food and taking time to enjoy it. And it makes sense. Lifestyles with more time to sleep, exercise and prepare healthy meals could save a lot of dosh. The TUC  estimates that stress-related sick days cost employers up to £5 billion a year, and a study by the Legal Services Research Centre found that stress related to rising debt is costing the NHS up to £20 million a year.   

Arguments for a move away from economic growth began to surface in the 1970s when the Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen published a landmark essay on the irreversible waste of resources (The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, 1971), and MIT published their report Limits to Growth (1972).

But nearly 40 years on, the idea remains marginal and controversial, and it seems part of the problem is finding the right word for it in English.

Supporters have been referred to as ‘downshifters’ or ‘downsizers’, making them sound like martyrs to the cause. It’s only because the benefits of ‘growth’ are openly contested in the French media that ‘décroissance’ escapes nuances of doom. Some people like to drop the negative prefix ‘dé’ (as in ‘demolish’ and ‘degenerate’) and talk about ‘a-croissance’ (as in ‘atheism’), leaving the growth-spectrum behind altogether.

Others like to keep the ‘dé’ as a reminder that if we keep on growing as we are doing – in terms of both population and consumption – we’ll need another seven planets as rich in resources as ours to support us.

But whatever the word is, I’d rather find it now and start toying with its potential, than have it put in my mouth as the buttons burst off the Earth’s shirt.