dismal science, the Economics.

The term is Thomas Carlyle’s, and he first used it in On the Nigger Question (1849), writing: “The social science— not a ‘gay science’ but a rueful—which finds the secret of this Universe in ‘supply and demand’ . . . what we might call, by way of eminence, the dis- mal science.” He repeated it the following year in a pamphlet, and it gradu- ally caught on, becoming particularly popular among students struggling with the subject’s complexities.