The "bottom line"

... that ain't.

Language has always fascinated me. Oh, sure, it is amazing to learn another one and get a true, inside look at the ways of thinking of different language community and culture, but it is also breathtakingly wondrous to take a step back and look at one's own language with fresh eyes.

The title today is an everyday, common, often-used phrase, to be sure. "The bottom line": what it all really comes down to, the heart of the matter, whatever it is that makes the difference; the bottom line.

While we English-speakers all immediately understand it, a lot of us really don't know where the phrase comes from. This one comes right out of business. The phrase is a simple, direct reference to the balance sheet: you look at what you took in, you look at what you had to spend to get it, and what's left over is profit, it's the last thing on the balance sheet, it's the bottom line.

Now, for those of you not schooled in the intricacies of business theory, this is what is generally known as "net profit". Profit is -- and most people don't know this -- just like temperature: it's of one bolt of cloth; it may be positive and it may be negative, and so it is with profit as well. (Negative profit is generally referred to a "loss", but that's another story.) Yes, the bottom line in the actual, real, factual, calculated what's-left-over-after-all-is-said-and-done; it's, well, the bottom line.

Of course, none of this is particularly special, is it. After all, it's just a phrase, we all use it, and now, we all know where it come from, but so what? To me, we now come to the interesting part. This is a phrase from business, commerce, from the economic sphere. It doesn't have to do with people, emotions, personalities, feelings, justice, correctness, morality, or any other of those fuzzy, hard-to-identify-and-agree-on notions folks are always throwing around. No, the bottom line is the razor-sharp, intricately calculated what-it-is. We take a cold, impersonal, calculated concept, and apply it willy-nilly to just about any situation we can think of. We use it in our daily affairs, in our marriages, our relationships to kin, with our friends, enemies, partners and competitors. We're not really talking about "profit", we use it to mean what is, in the end, important enough to take special note of. This way of using words (for those of you who were asleep in English (or any other native-language) class, is what we call a metaphor: we use a word to mean something other than what it actually means because it makes the point better than whatever other word we were thinking of using.

What I find so interesting about this is that we -- especially in the English-speaking world -- are using an increasing number of such metaphors (that is, those coming from the business, commerce, economic sphere) in our everyday speech. We've not only commercialized our society, we're doing it to our language as well. This is not a comforting development.

While all language use is, ultimately, metaphorical, it might be a good idea to take stock of where we're getting our metaphors from. There's a too-close relationship between how we think, how we speak, and how we act.