The word ‘investment’ traces back to a metaphor about dressing money

Evidence

Derrida’s intervention was to suggest that the line between metaphor and other elements of speech is “always already” blurred. This is in contrast to analytic theories that see metaphor as merely a second-order element of speech, an artificial creative substitution of meaning used for stylistic purposes. Derrida argues that a large number of the words we use every day were once metaphors, and that metaphor is a process at the very core of language. Take, for instance, the word investment. It stems from the Latin vestire, from which we also derive the word vest: it means to dress or to cloak oneself. Early-modern Italian merchants used this as a metaphor for the different profitable purposes to which money could be put – they were dressing their money up when they lent it to trading or manufacturing ventures that would bring a favourable return. This metaphor resonated, and the word invest became independent of its original meanings, folding into living language. It began to become what linguists call a dead metaphor, a metaphor whose metaphoric quality has disappeared or goes unremarked or unobserved. Lo and behold, by the late 20th century investment not only named the most profitable activity in a hyper-financialized global capitalist economy, but was increasingly borrowed as a metaphor to explain all manner of activities in our social lives. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 66

Categorization

• DEFINE: Etymology of ‘investment’ (Latin vestire — to dress/cloak) and the concept of a ‘dead metaphor’ explained concretely.
• CANDY: ‘Investment literally derives from dressing your money’ is a light, tweetable etymology fact.
• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of metaphor colonizing all social life — echo of the deWaard argument that financial language permeates everyday life.
• SEED: Potential essay: ‘Investing in yourself’ — how financial metaphors flattened human selfhood into a capital-accumulation frame, traced from the dead metaphor etymology.