stock index
"But there's a serious question here: The metaphors that are used for describing market trends are bizarrely elaborate, compelling, and contradictory. On the one hand, a stock index is like a climber subject to gravity: It "slips" or "falls", it "climbs" and "slips back" or "sinks", it "claws back" its losses, or is subject to "corrections", it "soars" unless it is "weighed down" by bad news, in which case it might "dip" or "plunge". (I'm sure there are lots more colourful words that I'm not thinking of now. In German I've seen reference to a "Borsentalfahrt". And at least the stock market is springy -- after it crashes, it tends to "bounce".) So, the gravity metaphor suggests that the natural tendency of markets is to go down, even"crash"."
"To translate the first paragraph, index funds are mutual funds that track an index. And to translate the translation-- a stock index is like a book index. So let's take a cookbook. Everything under the Soup section of the index is the contents of the book that are soup. An index lists contents, that's all. "
METAMIA is a free database of analogy and metaphor. Anyone can contribute or search. The subject matter can be anything. Science is popular, but poetry is encouraged. The goal is to integrate our fluid muses with the stark literalism of a relational database. Metamia is like a girdle for your muses, a cognitive girdle.