Verbs and the stock market

Greg Saitz of The Star-Ledger in Newark writes Sunday about the different verbs that business journalists use to describe what happens in the stock market.

Saitz writes, “There is a larger question, however, about what the end user takes away from reading or hearing such descriptions. Is a slide worse than a dip, or is it better to soar than surge?

“Chris Potts is an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts who teaches conversational inference and specializes in formal pragmatics, which looks at how language and context interact. Most words, he said, come with a series of underlying connotations — plunge is kind of scary, while soar is positive and brings to mind an eagle.

“‘All of that is coming along with these statements about the market,’ Potts said. ‘They’re describing a very objective thing about the markets, but they’re also adding an emotional layer to it.’

“The results can be powerful, prompting Potts to sound a bit like Uncle Ben in ‘Spider-Man’ when he said, ‘You could use it for good or for ill.'”

Read more here.