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Market and economic downturns have always sent analysts searching for easy and relatable explanations in the form of metaphoric cliches. Author Gregory Zuckerman suggests, "Descriptive imagery can be helpful, providing a way to visualize an event or challenge. Vicious periods for stock investors have long been described as bear markets (often with a dependable modifier, "grinding"). Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote: "The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power of man. Its efficacy verges on magic." But many see the reflexive resort to trite analogies as unhelpful, even misleading. "People feel a need to make sense of events and find explanations, and this gives a veneer of credibility, but in fact the executives have no clue and are flailing around like everyone else," Mr. [Sydney] Finkelstein [a corporate-leadership professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College] said. "It's the perfect excuse to shift blame."

This Wall Street Journal interactive employs lyrics from the musical Hamilton as well as the song lyrics of the Fugees, Nas, Kendrick Lamar, Rakim, etc. to illustrate sound devices in context. Audio included.

Singular "they," the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening. In a landslide vote, the language experts chose singular they over "thanks, Obama," ammosexual, "on fleek," and other contenders for this annual award given to the most significant term or word in the past year. Singular they, which The Washington Post officially adopted in its Style guide in 2015, is already a common habit in American speech. An example: "Everyone wants their cat to succeed." Earlier, the so-called proper way to say it would have been, "Everyone wants his or her cat to succeed."But what gave this word new prominence was its usefulness as a way to refer to people who don't want to be called "he" or "she." "We know about singular they already - we use it everyday without thinking about it, so this is bringing it to the fore in a more conscious way, and also playing into emerging ideas about gender identity," said linguist Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who presided over the voting this Friday afternoon.