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Does this sentence strike you as odd?
The markets are up today!
Probably not. It's a very ordinary way to speak. But Fisher Investments Press author Michael Hanson believes if you really think about it, this sentence is a truly weird thing. Consider: By making reference to the position of a physical object in space, you’ve expressed an outcome (and your feelings toward it) about an object that doesn’t tangibly exist.
Saying the market is "up" is a metaphor. Nothing is physically moving upward. It’s just an expression to say the value of the market is larger than it was.
Maybe all that strikes you as mundane, but simple sentences like that one can tell us a lot. In fact, an understanding of linguistic basics can help you be a better investor. The media in particular traps us with various metaphors, and those metaphors govern how we think about things. Politicians do this all the time by creating euphemisms for things they don't really want to say. For instance, is it "spreading around the wealth" or a "tax hike"? Depends who you ask!
Fisher Investments Press author Michael Hanson believes language is an evolutionary adaptation—a means for us to communicate. Think of what a tremendous advantage it was tens of thousands of years ago for humans in the wild who could transfer ideas, thoughts, and commands into another person’s head by simply making sounds! Those poor wildebeasts didn’t stand a chance in the long run.
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