Where Swearing is all about context

Workers fired by President Felipe Calderón protested last month. One sign said Mr. Calderón would sell his mother if he could.


The electrical workers who were recently fired by President Felipe Calderón also clearly wanted the worst impression possible to be read into the protest signs they lofted. One banner, a tame one, referred to Mr. Calderón as a “pinche ladrón,” which can be translated as a “damn crook.” Pinche, though, can also be a word with no negative connotation at all, meaning a cook’s assistant.


Mexicans, despite their reputation in Latin America for ultrapoliteness and formality, curse like sailors, a recent survey found. They use profanity when speaking with their friends, with their co-workers, with their spouses and even with their bosses and parents. On Independence Day, the thing to shout above all else is “Viva Mexico, Cabrones!” a patriotic exhortation directed at either bastards or buddies, depending on the tone employed.

AOL, Time Warner to Split

The Wall Street Journal has its own language; the more puns, the better. Cliches area allowed, too.

The first big marriage of bricks and clicks is officially kaput.

‘Recovery’ sí; ‘Stimulus’ no

Words matter, but how much? Read on.

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

“We’re not using the word ‘stimulus,’ ” Speaker Nancy Pelosi confided at a news conference.

Mixed metaphors, er ...

In today's Wall Street Journal, there is a story about a meat-processing company. The language gets just a mite mangled. To wit:

A recent decision by Smithfield Foods Inc. to use only American pork in its products could boost its bottom line. But what the company really needs are higher prices for its live hogs and lower costs for raising cash.

Last month, Smithfield completed the sale of its beef-processing and cattle-feeding operation to JBS SA of Brazil. Now that beef is off its balance sheet, analysts are expressing a fair amount of bullishness about the Smithfield, Va., company's shares.

Let's see: Smithfield decided to concentrate on pork, so it sold its beef and cattle operations; now that it has no beef, some analysts are bullish on the company.

Say what?

Metaphors Fly Like Bad Analogies

Washington and Wall Street are trying to sell a $700 billion financial-markets rescue package to a skeptical public, and, amid popping bubbles and golden parachutes, the metaphors and similes are taking wing.

Politics and finance always favor cliches and stock phrases to straight talk, but this crisis has opened up the flood gates.

"Unfortunately, the economy, it's a little like a bathtub," billionaire investor Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, told CNBC this week, explaining why the average American suffers when investment banks collapse. "You can't have cold water in the front and hot water in the back."

That makes it pretty clear. Buffett speaks plainly.

On the Senate floor Friday, Mr. Schumer took the image from prognosis to prescription. "We must come together and work in a bipartisan way to unclog those arteries...and we must do it soon," he said. But the medicine was tainted, he said, by Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, who suspended his campaign briefly, rushed to Washington, "put another fly in the ointment and created more trouble."

He urged the Arizona senator to "leave town and not throw fire on these flames."

Throw fire on these flames? Say what, Chuck? Put a fly in the ointment? My Lord!

Why the rush to deploy metaphor to describe the Wall Street crisis? "Because nobody can understand it," says John D. Casnig, founder of the Metaphor Observatory, a Web site for fans of figurative language.

Those who understand can't speak plainly; most people seem to yearn for simple images.

With the experts talking credit-default swaps, rate resets, cram-down bankruptcies and exchange-stabilization funds, who wouldn't swoon with visions of derivatives dancing in their heads? "Metaphor is used when we can't understand something in its own context," says Mr. Casnig, who last year declared "mortgage meltdown" the third-most-popular metaphor of 2007, two spots behind the "troop surge" and just shy of "perfect storm."

One of Mr. Casnig's financial favorites comes from John Oliver, on the TV news parody "The Daily Show," who says that searching for another way for leaders to mess up the economy is "like finding a vein on a failure junkie."

After all, "credit is the lifeblood of the economy," Mr. Bernanke noted.

Cubicle Conversation

This is funny.

To succeed in business, it's not enough to have the sleekest laptop, the latest iPhone and the brightest ideas. You also need the right vocabulary. But don't worry.

If you want to be the boss or "fancy yourself the savviest kid on Wall Street," what you need instead, says Gregory Bergman, associate editor of Equities Magazine, is a vocabulary replete with "BizzWords." That play on buzzwords satirizes the mania for using internal capitalization in corporate and trade names -- SwingLine, ChevronTexaco, HarperCollins -- a practice that is prosaically called "BiCapitalization." (I like to call it "upsizing.")

ExxonMobil, InBev; the list goes on and on.

BizzWords constitute the "emerging vocabulary" of business English, according to Mr. Bergman, and in his book "BizzWords" he offers us a collection of "some of the newest, hippest, and most important . . . terms used in corporate America today." His dictionary "is all you need to sound like a business big shot," he boasts with marketing tongue in cheek. "Now if you could only figure out how to use Excel."

Consider these: chainsaw consultant, "an outside consultant brought in to fire employees"; brightsizing, "downsizing by laying off the brightest workers"; layoff lust, "the desire to be fired from one's job"; and to Nasdaq, meaning "to sharply decline in value or quantity."

Brightsizing is funny; I had layoff lust my last year at MetLife.

Apparently because the worlds of business and the Internet are now so intertwined, "BizzWords" culls several terms from cyberslang, including clickstream ("the virtual path a person takes while surfing the Web"), Zen mail ("an e-mail message without text or attachments") and Dorito syndrome (dissatisfaction felt after wasting time surfing the Net and accomplishing nothing).

I get Dorito syndrome; Zen mail is brilliant.

Bottom feeding

This item appeared in Bloomberg News; it's worth printing the entire, short item here.

Citigroup Selling $12 Billion of Loans to Buyout Firms, FT Says

April 8 (Bloomberg) -- Citigroup Inc. is in talks to sell $12 billion of leveraged loans to Apollo Management LP, Blackstone Group LP and TPG Inc., the Financial Times said, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter.

The loans include debt used to finance acquisitions by the three private equity firms and their rivals, the Financial Times reported on its Web site. The buyers would purchase the loans at a discount of about 90 cents on the dollar, the newspaper reported. The sale would advance Citigroup Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit's plan to reduce the bank's balance sheet.

Apollo would buy about half the portfolio, with the rest going to Blackstone and TPG, the newspaper said. Citigroup may disclose the sale next week at about the same time that it posts first-quarter financial results, the Financial Times reported.

That would allow Citi to clean up its balance sheet a bit (12 billion is a bit for that behemoth), and would give the three buyers a 10% discount on par value of the loans. Clearly, the three expect that, in time, they will get 100% of par, or at least more than 90% -- or else, why buy? The three firms can take a longer-term view than Citi, which is getting pummeled.

The wording of the news item shows how careless some of these financial websites can be with their English: reduce the bank's balance sheet? No, clean it up by reducing its exposure