„Die Bauindustrie ist enttäuscht und bei den deutschen Töchtern spielt die Musik im Ausland“ – ausgewählte Metaphern aus der Wirtschaftssprache des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhunderts in Zitaten aus der Wirtschaftspresse

Abstract

Is it possible to implement stylistic, rhetorical figures into substantive, factual language of the economy? Can industries be attributed to feelings and to businesses to thoughts? Apparently yes, the possibilities of metaphorical descriptions are almost endless. On the contrary to a solemn image of some business magazines, metaphors are a favourite stylistic measure. For example, the word “growth” widely used in economy indicates analogies between plants, human beings and enterprises. Business dictionaries classify ‘growth’ as a specialised term that readers generally do not interpret metaphorically. As a dead metaphor, this word becomes part of other complex words derived from it, such as “the goal of growth” or “the growth rate”. An expression “foreign growth” is commonly used, readers do not relate it to growth of foreign plants, nor associate it with humans. In addition to the so-called ‘empty’ metaphors in business language, which are hardly ever perceived as such, business journalism uses numerous terms that are dependent on the business cycle and often coined spontaneously. They reflect the economic situation as visual metaphors at a specific moment in history. Such metaphorical measures, shown here in the contexts of the economic press of the end of the twentieth century and compared with those from the late nineteenth century, are discussed in this article.

Keywords

• metaphor
• economic language
• economic press
• 19th and 20th century