In a matter of months, sub-prime loans went from opportunity to threat: if mortgages to credit-risky borrowers could deflate the US housing market, what might they do to our own delicate bubble?

Yet new entrants kept showing up here, sometimes backed by the very financial institutions at the heart of the American mortgage crisis.

Irish Life & Permanent teamed up with Merrill Lynch, and IIB Homeloans partnered Lehman Brothers, joining GE Money, Kensington's Start.

Nua Homeloans opened for business the first week of this month.

But they weren't offering sub-prime loans. Oh no.

Instead, we started hearing about 'near-prime', 'nonprime', 'non-conforming' and even 'specialist' mortgages.

It seems the banks were (wisely) trying to put some semantic distance between a burgeoning, underserved segment of Irish borrowers and a nationwide calamity of exploitation and bad judgment on the other side of the pond.

In reality, Irish banks have very little exposure to the US mortgage market and loan arrears are historically much lower here than in the US, but fear is contagious as AIB's American subsidiary M&T Bank can testify.

Poor M&T got hammered when investors, spooked by failures in the sub-prime sector, shied away from buying into its more stable Alt-A loan book. Sub-prime, Alt-A; tomayto, tomahto.

This kind of linguistic uncertainty arises from the difference between the way bankers talk to each other and the way they talk to customers.

'Prime', in this case, is just banker shorthand for high quality loans - debt that is almost certain to be repaid. When bankers modify this adjective with the prefixes 'sub' or 'below', they're simply refining the term's literal meaning.

From the banker's point of view, a risky loan is of lesser quality than a sure thing - something especially important when these loans get packaged, or securitised, and sold to investors.

'Sub-prime' has a transparent meaning for a banking audience.

But sub-prime isn't a great marketing term. While for a banker 'sub' and 'below' are synonyms, a customer hears 'sub' as shorthand for 'substandard' or, worse, 'subhuman'. While sub-prime lenders do specifically target customers with less-than-perfect (ie, substandard) credit histories, such customers actually offer superstandard margins.

The spread on a typical sub-prime loan in Ireland - 300-400 basis points - is much juicier than the 100bps available on standard mortgages.

Bankers understandably want to avoid repelling this segment, so they deploy soothing euphemisms to reassure customers.

You're not a 'sub-prime' loan candidate with a patchy credit history, they tell the customer, you're 'near-prime' (almost there) or 'nonconforming' (a different lending category altogether). Got an irregular income or opaque personal accounting? Well, a 'specialist' mortgage could be right for you. Who doesn't want to be special? (Nonconforming is a little less persuasive and dangerously close to 'nonperforming. ) It would be easier to accept this rhetoric of reassurance if the lenders themselves didn't seem so embarrassed by their own business.

Out of the five sub-prime providers in the Irish market, only one (GE Money) trades under its own name.

The other four operate separate brand strategies. Hence Start and Springboard rather than Kensington and IL&P. Springboard even markets a product called - no kidding - Bounceback.

These naming conventions suggest a sales pitch: our products build and repair credit history. (Balance Beam, Teeter Totter and Pit of Despair failed to please the focus groups, presumably. ) They also suggest a kind of social welfare capitalism which sits more comfortably with the Irish consumer than the leg-breaking, legal-loansharking image some commentators have applied to the sub-prime market.

But these bearish wags have also missed an opportunity to take a page out of the Yank straight-talk dictionary.

The country that invented the selfcertify credit-repair sub-prime mortgage has two words for you: liar loan.