Keep Your Head in the Clouds and Your Feet on the Ground
139assessing the value of a company, real property, security, antique or other
item of worth.
The fact that FUTURE and its forecasting are inherently linked to
financial management is also shown in the names of financial instruments
such as futures and bonds. Futures are financial contracts obligating the
buyer to purchase an asset, such as a physical commodity or another
financial instrument, at a predetermined future date and price. Bonds, on
the other hand, are debt instruments with long term maturity, fixed interest
rate, contractual terms and conditions (Patterson 2011a: 55).
In accounting and financial management of projects, costs must be
“foreseen in the estimated budget” in order to be eligible.^3 Financial
management is also described as “anticipating risks and hedging against
downsides” (Patterson 2011b: 155). Additionally, the working of
conceptual metaphor FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT IS FORECASTING
FUTURE can be detected in terms for specialists within the domain, e.g.
financial planner. A financial planner or personal financial planner is a
professional who prepares financial plans for individuals or institutions.
These financial plans often cover cash flow management, retirement
planning, investment planning, financial risk management, insurance
planning, tax planning, estate planning and business succession planning.
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT IS MANIPULATION
OF TOKENS
Financial operations are generally conceptualized as acts of passing
objects from hands to hands. Depending on the direction of the transfer,
these forms of token manipulation may be linguistically represented by
pairs of converse verbs such as: giving/taking, buying/selling,
putting/removing, borrowing/returning (Schlesinger 1995: 56). Sometimes
conceptually more complex forms of token manipulation serve as source
domains for metaphorical transfers resulting in the emergence of financial
terminology, for example, exchanging, circulating, relocating, adding,
multiplying, dividing.
One of the central duties of a financial manager is to acquire capital,
i.e. to raise funds. In the concrete source domain, this highly abstract
activity can be compared to the process of gathering sticks or collecting
stones. Few companies are able to fund all their activities solely with
funds from internal sources and they need to receive them from others,
which again is conceptualized as transfers of material objects. Tokens that
(^3) https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/sites/eacea-site/files/culture-financial-mgt.swf