Fences Make Good Bankers

Quote:  “He is expected to ring-fence his assets so that he will have no influence on how they are managed.” Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag, in the New York Times.

Figure of Speech: anthimeria (an-thih-MER-ia), the verbing figure.

Bush’s nominee for Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, will take a $38 million pay cut when he leaves his CEO job at Wall Street’s top firm.  To avoid any conflict of interest, he will probably create a blind trust for his $700 million in Goldman stock.

The firm’s spokesman uses highfalutin investment jargon, “ring-fence,” to describe the move.  That’s an anthimeria, a figure that turns one part of speech into another — such as a noun into a verb.

Language snobs who want to close our lexical borders hate this figure, because it’s a prodigious neologizer.  Calvin in “Calvin & Hobbes” dislikes the anthimeria (he’s surprisingly conservative for a six-year-old). “Verbing weirds language,” he says.

It certainly does.  But Shakespeare weirded language to form more than 1,500 neologisms.  In an age when the average person had a vocabulary of 700 (today’s college grad averages 3,000), Shakespeare’s exceeded 21,000.  If weirding was a turn-on for him (to use a once-popular anthimeria), it positively ecstacizes Figaro.

Snappy Answer:  “Ring-fence Bush while you’re at it.”

Comments

[Ken]

Oops! Calvin may be conservative, but if I remember the actual strip, his "Verbing weirds language" comment is actually in favor of the action.