Does it make a difference whether it is 'officially' a recession or not? What's clear is that there is something that might as well be called a slump (because it's a useful word in this context and has been used in the past) and that it's not going to get better within a year. Mass unemployment, squeezed living standards and no real growth, coupled with fears that everyone could yet fall down the next flight of stairs at some point, perhaps quite soon. Bad times, you know?
You are trying, from a liberal arts perspective, to describe the difference between an inventory-based recession or a cyclical recession and a credit-based or debt-based recession, the former being the more common/familiar type and the latter being what we've been in since 2008 (well, technically 2007, but whatever).
Personally, I prefer we go back to the old terms "panics" and "depressions", though panics historically referred to market crashes, and depressions usually referred to real recessions, or whatever, because they more accurately describe actual conditions. Though this is really wishful thinking, since the NBER changed all that in the 1930s, and I really have to assume we won't return to the former.
