In struggling to make sense of the stock market, people reach and stretch for metaphors. Sometimes they even contort, dislocate, and mangle. In 1995, Geoff P Smith of the University of Hong Kong made a grand unified effort to gather and classify those metaphors.
Smith congealed the metaphors and his thoughts into a monograph called How High Can a Dead Cat Bounce?: Metaphor and the Hong Kong Stock Market. It appeared in the journal Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.