Because I don’t have a television, one of my morning rituals is to do a big sweep of the news. Election season means that I check all the major news sources, plus The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert, in his segment called “Bears and Balls,” suggests that because the economy sucks in such a dire fashion, and the price of salt is so high, we should forget the silly notion of using currency and just use salt.

 

Then Colbert adds that, in Roman times, soldiers were paid in salt, and that it is from this tradition that we get the word “salary.” Now, sometimes Colbert says things that have a ring of truth, and this etymology sounded right to me. I mean, “salary”-sel (French)-salt. Plus, salt used to be extremely valuable, since it was one of the few ways to preserve food (and it tastes good). So I looked up “salary” in my beloved Oxford English Dictionary. And, indeed! Stephen Colbert was right! Except that soldiers weren’t paid in salt—they were allotted a certain amount of money to purchase salt. 

Speaking of news sources getting things right, check out The Wall Street Journal’s article “What History Tells Us about the Market.” Writer Jason Zweig gets points for writing a fascinating, clear article about why we should take heart during this economic crisis. But he gets major English Literature Nerd points (the only points that matter in my book) for quoting my girl Emily Dickinson! The poem is “After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes”:

This is the Hour of Lead— 
Remembered, if outlived, 
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow— 
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.

Brilliant. Emily D.’s words are brilliant, of course, but so is Zweig’s use of them, because he’s trying to describe something called the “disposition effect” (or, as Zweig puts it, a “collective stupor”) which is what happens soon after your pained reaction to the fact that you have just lost a fourth (or third, or half) of your savings. First, it really hurts. Then, you grow numb to it—the “disposition effect.” This is when you just can’t bear to think about having lost so much money, and you can’t bring yourself to do anything about it. It turns out that this can be a good thing, because it prevents people from making rash decisions. Who knew that Emily Dickinson could explain the economy?