Writes a commenter at WaPo, reacting to "Hong Kong’s landmark Jumbo floating restaurant sinks at sea": "Even before the pandemic, the restaurant, which served Cantonese fare, was accumulating debt. But Hong Kong’s early move to ban tourists hit Jumbo Kingdom and other attractions hard."
ADDED: I was curious about the origin of the term "under water" (or "underwater") to refer to negative equity, and I surprised to see that the earliest example in the OED is from Madison, Wisconsin's own Capital Times (and as recent at 1975):
Every foreclosure of an underwater real estate mortgage..is greeted with cheers. Evidence that the economy is doing less to help itself is taken as a guarantee that the Fed will do more.
I couldn't find an explanation of why this figurative use became standard, but perhaps water metaphors are common in discussions of money. We speak of sinking or staying afloat. There's "liquidity."
Is "solvent" a water image? I see that "solvent," meaning "Able to pay all one's debts or liabilities," goes back to the 1600s:
1653 H. Cogan tr. F. M. Pinto Voy. & Adventures lxxviii. 315 Certain Chineses, who were not men solvent, but became bankrupts.
1664 Addit. to Life Mede in Mede Wks. (1672) p. xxxvi Mr. Mede began..to refuse.., and objected, How shall I be able to be solvent in convenient time?
"Solvent" is the present participle of the Latin word "solvĕre," which means to explain or clear up or answer. But "solvent" has also meant "Dissolving; causing solution" or a substance that turns other substances to liquid. This is the same entry, so it's the same word.
Interestingly, "solvent" itself has a figurative use. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "Silence is a solvent that destroys personality" (1841).
AND: Here's Emerson's essay, "Intellect":
Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it in the chemical tables, positively to that which stands below it. Water dissolves wood, and iron, and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire dissolves air, but the intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature, in its resistless menstruum.
Wow! A menstruation metaphor!
Intellect lies behind genius, which is intellect constructive. Intellect is the simple power anterior to all action or construction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a natural history of the intellect, but what man has yet been able to mark the steps and boundaries of that transparent essence?....
As long as I hear truth, I am bathed by a beautiful element, and am not conscious of any limits to my nature. The suggestions are thousandfold that I hear and see. The waters of the great deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I speak, I define, I confine, and am less. When Socrates speaks, Lysis and Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that they do not speak. They also are good. He likewise defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks. Because a true and natural man contains and is the same truth which an eloquent man articulates: but in the eloquent man, because he can articulate it, it seems something the less to reside, and he turns to these silent beautiful with the more inclination and respect. The ancient sentence said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods. Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal. Every man's progress is through a succession of teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a superlative influence, but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let him accept it all. Jesus says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, and follow me. Who leaves all, receives more. This is as true intellectually as morally. Each new mind we approach seems to require an abdication of all our past and present possessions.....
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Possible insurance fraud or strategic way to save face:
- Failing, dated, old-fashioned business
- "Sudden" requirement to move after decades in one place
- Sinks immediately during the move
“Bankruptcy” is from the Latin and it means “broken bench.” When a merchant or money changer was insolvent, the government would break the bench and kick the person out of the market.
Emerson was a pinhead with an exceptional way with words.
Excellent. Even a reference to "Mr. Mede." There's also "liquid assets." On one of the old Law and Order: CI episodes, a crook is using the law to avoid paying what is owed to an elderly woman who needs the money. "The day I'm liquid will be the day the old lady croaks."
during the two Decades it took gilbar to attain his Bachelor of Science degree,
his MAIN concern was sinking below C-Level.. Which (Obviously) he sank below Many times
I wonder if this restaurant started its slide once the Chinese took over Hong Kong and kicked freedom out. I suspect that had a massive impact on random tourism.
I'm pretty surprised that 'under water' was first used in a financial reference in 1975. That seems much more recent than I would have guessed. I would have guessed 1929. Under Water, Investopedia
What "chemical tables" was Emerson looking at in 1841? Here's Wikipedia's "History of the periodic table."
I guess this will cost them their Michelin stars, won’t it?
Duh. Try breathing air underwater. Drowning in debt, what could that possibly mean? Is it because humans who drown are literally insolvent in water? What about submarines? It's all so confoundling.
there are fires and there are good fires
this may gave been a good fire
I first dined there in the 80's and then a couple of more times in the 90's at the insistence of my wife, who loved it for reasons known only to her. I remember it as a novelty that lots of Americans had heard of and wanted to try, particularly those who weren't too adventurous as regards lesser known but better Chinese restaurants. IIRC the menu became more refined (and more expensive) for each successive deck above the main deck.
For my money the best restaurant with the most extensive menu, both Chinese and Western colonial, is (was?) Jimmy's Kitchen in Kowloon which was not far from the Star Ferry Landing. Jimmy's prices were hard to beat, the quality was consistent and it was just up the street from Ned Kelly's Last Stand,a famous Aussie pub with a legendary Dixieland Jazz band. It was hard to beat dinner at Jimmy's and then a few hours at Ned's listening to great jazz. I haven't been to either since 2008, and I'd be surprised if either place is still there. Of course, the old Kowloon isn't really there anymore either.
This was a huge restaurant. They had a bunch of ferries to get out there. The volume of service was insane.
I haven’t seen anything like it in the US.
I had the pleasure of dining there the week before China took over. Of course we had Cantonese chicken.
The place was a madhouse with tables jammed close together and waiters flying everywhere. Definitely a tourist trap but lots of fun. Sorry to see it go.
Is "underwater" better or worse than "upside-down"?
Say what you like about the awful German language with its monstrously long words, but it seems that they don't have these "one word or two," "hyphenated or unhyphenated" problems.
Wikipedia says that Lavoisier came up with a list of "simple substances" in the 18th century, and Dalton assigned atomic weights to those elements in the early 19th.
"...surprised to see that the earliest example in the OED is from Madison, Wisconsin's own Capital Times..."
Well, of course! Somewhere in there is a connection to 'bubbler.'
"...surprised to see that the earliest example in the OED is from Madison, Wisconsin's own Capital Times..."
Well, of course! Somewhere in there is a connection to 'bubbler.'
"Solvent" and "liquid" use water (a liquid and a solvent) as a metaphor for cash. Because cash is easy to exchange for goods and services but houses and business and fleets of trucks are not. Your "liquid" assets are those quickly and easily convertible to cash, and cash is the "solvent" that turns solid assets into liquid.
Cash is also like water in that cash is interchangeable and divisible. It's not easy to negotiate the sale of 5/8 of a truck, for example, and to anyone who acquires that 5/8 truck it's not interchangeable with 5/8 of a different truck.
The earliest reference I know of to this property is Emperor Vespasian's comment on his urine tax:
The Urine Tax was considered a disgusting policy by Vespasian's son, and future emperor, Titus. Roman historians Dio Cassius and Suetonius wrote about Vespasian’s unpopular tax in their history books saying that when Titus complained about it, his father reportedly picked up a gold coin and remarked, "Pecunia non olet", or, "Money does not stink”.
Emerson:
"As long as I hear truth, I am bathed by a beautiful element, and am not conscious of any limits to my nature."
Hoo boy.
Pretty much everything Emerson wrote is so totally and completely bogus that I propose that we quantify bogosity using units of "Emersons". So, a statement by Biden might register "4 Emersons," while another statement by Trump might be "4.8 Emersons."
Of course, entire fields could simply be referred to as registering in the kilo-Emerson range (kE) while a few fields would simply be referred to as mega-Emerson (mE).
Did people of the time actually enjoy reading Emerson? Did they like the opposite of a "page-turner" — something that required you to read very slowly? When I read it, I try to imagine being someone who would feel it's perfectly wonderful to be slowed down like that.
This is something to savor — like fine wine instead of cheap beer.
This style of writing came from Thomas Carlyle:
"George Eliot summarized Carlyle's impact in 1855: 'It is an idle question to ask whether his books will be read a century hence: if they were all burnt as the grandest of Suttees on his funeral pile, it would be only like cutting down an oak after its acorns have sown a forest. For there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle's writings; there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived.'
"Two of Carlyle's most important disciples were Emerson and Ruskin. In the 19th century, Emerson was often thought of as 'the American Carlyle.' In 1870, Emerson sent Carlyle one of his books with the inscription, 'To the General in Chief from his Lieutenant.'..."
"Carlyle believed that his time required a new approach to writing: 'But finally do you reckon this really a time for Purism of Style; or that Style (mere dictionary style) has much to do with the worth or unworth of a Book? I do not: with whole ragged battallions of Scott's-Novel Scotch, with Irish, German, French and even Newspaper Cockney (when "Literature" is little other than a Newspaper) storming in on us, and the whole structure of our Johnsonian English breaking up from its foundations,—revolution there as visible as anywhere else!'
"At the beginning of his literary career, Carlyle worked to develop his own style, cultivating one of intense energy and visualisation, characterized not by "balance, gravity, and composure" but "imbalance, excess, and excitement." Even in his early anonymous periodical essays his writing distinguished him from his contemporaries. Carlyle's writing in Sartor Resartus is described as "a distinctive mixture of exuberant poetic rhapsody, Germanic speculation, and biblical exhortation, which Carlyle used to celebrate the mystery of everyday existence and to depict a universe suffused with creative energy.""
Collateral damage from cargo cult science and Mengele mandates.
I sink, therefore I am not.
People in Emerson's own day thought he was hard to understand.
In high school, I thought I understood him perfectly well, but probably I just wasn't paying attention.
Dickens was also influenced by Carlyle, maybe not in his style, but in the odd collection of opinions he had which don't fit into today's pigeon holes.
I love Carlyle. You can give Sartor Resartus to anyone and they will love it. Ruskin, on the other hand....what a nut. I had to slog many of his books in college and afterward because I did a (still ongoing) preservation of the documents of the three utopian colonies founded in the U.S. using his books as a guide.
Suffice to say, there were problems. He wasn't a practical man to say the least, sometimes wrote beautifully, but to form a frontier colony based on art history and Fabian socialism? And the syphillis didn't clarify things. The Tennessee colony was in a cave. The Georgia one was on swampland so mucky the black sharecroppers gave them food to keep them from starving (which didn't keep them from banning blacks). There are some magical photos from the final Florida colony, girls in gauzy dresses performing Shakespeare on top of fallen pine trees in dangerous wilderness. Panthers had a thing for women at certain times of the month. They offered one half day of study and one half day of farming in exchange for a quite good classical college degree, no fees, just labor. It seems like a great idea now. Then the annual tomato battle after the crops came in. Hamilton College has some of the collection, if anyone's interested. Imagine reading Ruskin in a mosquito-filled swamp, subsisting on persimmons and wearing cotton longjohns in Florida in 1910?
We call our money "currency". It flows, like a current. The concept of Liquidity stems from that same idea.
I don't know where "under water" (or "underwater") to refer to negative equity" came from, but is there anyone who didn't understand what it meant the first time he/she heard the expression?
Had a professor in college who, apparently coked-up, would march into the class 5 minutes late and read, in dramatic fashion, long passages of Emerson to us. It was fascinating.
It does not, unfortunately, contain "underwater" in that sense but on the chance you aren't familiar with it, or for the benefit of others. I thought I'd link this site. For years this gentleman documented some interesting etymology of words and phrases. He retired a few years back but built up quite an archive.
https://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm
Not just the site overall but his About Me page make some interesting reading and he wrote a few books you might appreciate as well.
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