You would think that—in a speech that aimed to calm the American public down—mentioning a word that conjures up the Black Plague, tuberculosis, and the boils that spread over Egypt when the Pharaoh messed with Moses would be a bad call.

But you'd be wrong.

FDR compares the bank failures over the past few years to a quickly-spreading virus. He says, "we do not want to have another epidemic of bank failures" (32). The power of this word "epidemic" is twofold.

The first is the old scare-tactic maneuver. If you call something an epidemic, people probably are going to want to keep their distance. If the cult surrounding Leo DiCaprio in the 90s had been called LeoEpidemic instead of LeoMania, there might not have been so many teenage girls buying knockoff Heart of the Ocean pendants.

The other reason is that diseases—epidemics in particular—spread quickly and affect anyone equally, without discrimination. Your power and your wealth don't save you from cholera…any more than (moderate) power and wealth can save you from a bank failure. An epidemic is an equal-opportunity destroyer of lives.

This is super-clever wording on FDR's part, because he's insinuating that even he, powerful as he may be, could still be affected by the repercussions of bank runs. And that goes a long way towards achieving his goal of sounding like the kind of dude you'd invite over to actually chat at your fireside.