Chapter Five
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different languages with the coinage of new terms. The new vocabulary
was meant to explain the causes of the world financial ailments, especially
given that, a result, new financial mechanisms and procedures had to be
forged, named and explained so as to find solutions to the created
problems. English has been the language of this crisis, not only because
the problems originated in the United States, but also because English is
the world language of finance. Consequently, the immense majority of the
new financial terms were first coined in English, and then translated into
other languages. As many of those financial neonyms referred to new and
unknown financial practices, they created evident problems when they had
to be transferred into the rest of languages, for obvious cognitive,
terminological and pragmatic reasons. Due to the urgent need to apply
these newly-named financial procedures and mechanisms, many of such
terms were just calqued or borrowed in their original form. They served
well the professionals’ purposes, but posed big problems for those target
language receivers whose financial knowledge and command of English
was not too high.
Although metaphors are consubstantial with business (trade and
finance) speech, they also play a fundamental role in the explanation of
specific economic procedures. Considered as a social science, economics
makes use of abstract mathematical models (geometry, diagrams and
graphs, functions, equations, derivatives, etc.) to define and explain
different economic phenomena scientifically. But even those who
advocate this scientific approach to economics also admit that metaphors
are a useful way of explaining, from a linguistic point of view, the highly
abstract concepts they typically deal with. Very often, I get the impression
that certain economic procedures and singularities could only be
interpreted by means of metaphors. Without empirical confirmation, I feel
prone to say that economy and its practical uses in business and finance
could not be defined and explained without using metaphorical
expressions, with respect to both their technical and informational levels.
Thus, I tend to agree with McCloskey’s words (1985: 75) when she wrote:
“each step in economic reasoning [...] is metaphoric”. Economy plays a
fundamental role in most people’s lives as they need to know how it may
influence their well-being and standards of living. This is particularly true
in the case of finance, where different monetary magnitudes and
applications are taken into account. A macro-definition of finance is,
according to the Merrian-Webster’s Dictionary, as follows: “the way in
which money is used and handled; especially, the way in which large
amounts of money are used and handled by governments and companies”.
However, as the important financial decisions that affect people’s lives are