The word amid

In attempts to make narratives out of the movements of a stock’s price on a given day, the word “amid” does a lot of work.

Other articles at different places cited the Trump administration’s confused policies towards Chinese investment in tech as “stoking investor fears.”

That’s another phrase you come across a lot.

“Making investors jittery.”  “Market jitters amid fears of…”

I’m struggling to decide whether, when we talk about why a stock or the stock market does something, we’re all that much different than those ancient diviners who pored over sheep entrails for clues to the future.

Jastrow on Wikipedia did the service of taking this photo of Akkadian liver models at the Louvre (of Jay Z and Beyonce fame)

In the popular business press, the explanations given for stock price movement are so often oversimplified or misleading. The gun stocks fallacy an insidious case.

‘Twas ever thus I guess.  “Amid” is a safe choice if the real answer is “who can say why it went up or down?”

I here perceive a bias towards narrative in a world that’s absurd and often ridiculous.

Reminded of E. M. Forster in Aspects Of The Novel.

Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot.

Amid is a word that lets you muddy up the distinction between story and plot.