The quote in the above headline came from recent show called, Master Blasters, which aired on the Sci-Fi Channel recently. The man who made that remark was a member of a team which competed against another team to build a house - complete with Dorothy, Toto, and the Wicked Witch of the West - meant to fly into the air, twist at least three times, deploy the witch, and land safely with the help of a huge parachute. Both teams were comprised of four men and one woman (the fluff), and the women - no big surprise - were not team leaders.

While the show sought to entertain targeted audiences, it informed at least a portion of its viewers about how some men could perceive women in a particular workspace. Additionally, the use of the metaphor, "fluff," also revealed how people use language to describe everything from animate women to inanimate contexts such as stock markets. The Economist this past week stated with tongue-in-cheek that their editors are on a mission to eliminate metaphors - specifically "agent metaphors" - from their writing. Their decision is based on recent tests that show how metaphors influence investors.

Agent metaphors are "those in which words normally applied only to animate beings are used in an inanimate context?" In other words, animate objects head upwards, and inanimate objects tend to head downwards according to Newton's Law of Gravity. Therefore, when an inanimate object, like the stock market, is animated by adverbs such as "bullish" or verbs such as "leap" or "rise," the investor might see the market as an agent that contains motive and a trajectory.

Object metaphors, on the other hand, use inanimate objects as descriptive words. When the market is described as "bearish (as in hibernating)," "sick (in a horizontal or downward mode)," or "flat-lining (dead)," the market may seem animated, but it becomes less so. The use of phrases like, "the stock plummeted like a rock," illustrates this example. When a woman is described as "fluff," this demonstrates a use of an object metaphor as well, as the animate object (the woman) is described as being marshmallow-y, or like decorative icing on a cake, rather than as a relevant team member.

I wonder sometimes if editors understand fully how certain words contained in certain contexts sway audiences. Any person - male or female - who watched that particular episode of Master Blasters might have walked away with at least a subconscious idea that women don't constitute main elements to team-building efforts. Anyone who read the July 23rd-29th 2005 issue of The Economist (which, by the way, included another interesting article about women in the marketplace), might ponder how he or she can change annual reports to appear more positive to investors through the use of agent metaphors.

Language is a powerful tool learned at an early age. How a person uses language depends upon how aware and skilled that person becomes with word power. Instructors include parents, teachers, authors, and peers. Out of this mix, parents seem more influential in a child's early life than any other tutor. Parents (or their guardians) have the power to turn off the TV, to explain reading and/or scripted audio and visual material, and to discuss language usage with their under-age kids more so than any other person in that child's early life. Accordingly, behavioral and learning patterns are established during early ages, and destructive patterns often take a long time to unravel.

For instance, when a parent teaches her child that it's ok to describe individuals as inanimate objects, that child might develop a mindset where it's ok to treat people as inanimate objects as well. When a parent is swayed by animated analyses in their investments, a child may learn that the stock market is an emotional effort. Or, the child may learn that inanimate descriptions about the market lack motives for investment.

Child education is a never-ending project that requires educated, or at least sensitive and motivated, instructors. It doesn't help that the English language is complicated and that many folks have learned to simplify their thoughts with quips and buzzwords rather than put some thought behind their verbalizations. Despite those difficulties, no one in my house is allowed to call a woman a fluff, so why would I tolerate that action from a scripted televised show?

Accordingly, I can't change how millions of writers and investors view inanimate financial markets scripted into life by agent metaphors. Over generations, folks have adjusted to bull and bear market terminology that seems cemented over stock market territory (that was an object metaphor applied to an inanimate terminology). In this light, it takes real effort to make financial decisions based on logic rather than on emotion. Perhaps this explains why The Economist treated the metaphor/stock market tests with humor. According to the author, built-in bullishness to markets can't be helped since "our hunter-gatherer ancestors' food could jump while their tools could not."

Until Next Week,
Linda Goin