Swinging Both Ways

Get your mind out of the gutter, this has nothing to do with any kind of sex!

 It may be true that language is used to keep people in their place, but the people themselves are at least partly to blame for this. I have occasionally been criticized for using "big words" when the word actually wasn't all that big, maybe two or three syllables. I can't think of an example right now, but it usually involves a word that is not commonly used by the person with whom I am talking. I think that, when someone says "big words", what he really means is "unfamiliar words". It's not necessarily that the person doesn't understand the word, or that he's never heard it before, it's just a word that he and his friends don't normally use. The reason they don't normally use the word is that they don't want to come across as some kind of intellectual, like that was a bad thing or something.

One of the first things I learned in the army was how quickly a closed group of people can evolve a language all their own. We all noticed that, after only a few weeks of basic training, we had adopted a dialect that would seem strange or even incomprehensible to the civilians back home. It was a running joke that we were worried that, when we went home on leave, we would sit down at the dinner table and casually say, "Pass the fucking salt." It wasn't just the profanity either, there was all kinds of military jargon, interspersed with foreign phrases and mispronunciations that we picked up from the sergeants. I don't know about the other guys, but whenever I went home on leave, and after I had been discharged, all that stuff quickly fell away in a matter of days. I think that was because people kept interrupting me and asking me to explain what I had just said, and I got tired of doing that. It kind of defeats the whole purpose of communication if nobody knows what you're talking about.

That's probably why subcultures, countercultures, and even mini-cultures develop their own mannerisms of speech. I don't think they do it on purpose, it's just natural to want to be quickly understood by your associates, and it's less important to be understood by outsiders. The more isolated a group is from the general public, the more quickly they will evolve their own dialect and, the longer they are so isolated, the more likely it is that their dialect will evolve into a totally different language.

I don't know a lot about those hedge funds, but I have picked up a little of it from watching the Bloomberg Channel. I think that a hedge fund is just a mutual fund that deals primarily with hedges. Okay, a hedge is just a way of, like, hedging your bets. I understand it better as it applies to commodities futures. A farmer plants a bunch of wheat and sells a "futures contract" on part of the expected harvest. They frequently do this to pay for the costs associated with planting, but that's not important for our purposes here. What both the buyer and seller of the contract are doing is betting on what they think the price of wheat will be at harvest time. If the price goes down, the farmer makes out and, if the price goes up, the buyer of he contract makes out. Actually, the contract will likely be bought and sold multiple times before the wheat is harvested, but that's not important for our purposes here. Like I said, the farmer makes out on the contract if the price goes below that, because he has already sold the wheat at the higher price. At the same time, he is losing money on the real time wheat that he has to sell, but the gain he made on the contract helps offset that loss. As the harvest time approaches, the farmer might re-evaluate his position and buy the contract back, in which case he may lose money on the contract, which is offset by the gain he made selling his real time wheat. I think the reason the farmers hedge their bets like that is it enables them to keep all their available land in production. Otherwise, they would have to make a decision each spring about how much wheat to plant and what other crops to plant to make up for the wheat that they didn't plant. I think that hedging in the stock market works somewhat the same way. They buy and sell these options, betting on what the price of the stock will be in the future. This enables them to keep all their money involved, while mitigating the risks they are taking. They don't gain as much if their bets pay off, but they don't lose as much if they don't.

There are two main categories of people who put money into the stock market, investors and speculators. Hedge funds and futures trading are for the speculators, and are not recommended for the investors like you and me. It's a full time high stress job for people who thrive on that sort of thing, not for the aged, the infirm, or the faint of heart.