Metaphors We Save By: Engineering Terminology in Financial Discourse

This paper takes at its starting point the seminal work by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By, to investigate the use of metaphor in financial discourse. Further theoretical insights are provided by Bhatia’s (2004) study of Worlds of Written Discourse. Reference is also made to Hayakawa’s (1938) Abstraction Ladder, a construct based on earlier work on semantics by Korzybski (1933). The study examines financial discourse broadly defined, to include banking, insurance and other financial operations. The main focus is on the use of metaphor and abstraction for the construction of meaning in a range of written texts, including company reports, publicity materials, and articles discussing financial issues from the Financial Times, The Economist, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Evidence is presented to show that geological and architectural metaphor is recurrent in the language of banking, insurance and finance, with a tendency in recent years to borrow terms also from the world of engineering. The paper examines the replacement of ‘indebtedness’, that has negative connotations from an ethical point of view (at least in the view of Polonius, in Hamlet), by the concept of ‘leveraging’ (and the reverse operation, ‘deleveraging’): it is argued that this genre-mixing with the use of engineering metaphor tends to sideline the ethical dimension of the financial operation and to foreground the idea of mechanical processes of a particularly ingenious kind. Engineering and architectural metaphor is also considered with reference to the Tower Bridge money box, a child’s toy dating back to a period before the concept of ‘deleveraging’, in which this iconic bridge is used to construct the ethical concept that the accumulation of wealth can be achieved as a gradual process by means of hard work and thrift.