Funny Money Words

The world of finance has an awful lot of jargon attached to it.

There’s far too much language gatekeeping, or people who use that jargon effectively in order to scare everyone away from investing. On Wall Street, you have to talk the talk if you want to walk the walk.

And, while it can be difficult to learn some of this lingo, the language itself tells a little story about how it came to be, like the word salary. Fairly recently, I pointed out that the word salary comes from the Latin word salarium, which was the little bag of salt (or the allowance) that each Roman soldier received.

Salary is a bit tricky, but some of these terms are pretty easy to figure out. For instance, there’s little mystery behind the word dividend, which is when a company pays you a fixed amount of money out of its available cash. This word traces its root to Latin, like so many of our modern money words. The original word dividendum means “thing to be divided.”

Less obvious is the word stock itself. Stock is …