On and on

I try my best in this blog to concentrate on economic and financial issues and to keep my nose out of linguistic ones. That, after all, is the area covered every Wednesday by my colleague Deborah Capras.

This past week, however, I feel like I have been pursued by one word and that I need to write about it in order to exorcise it from my system. 

Indeed, I've already used the word here three times, in the headline and the first sentence. No, I don't mean "and"; I'm talking about "on", from which there is no escape ("no" is the only anagram of "on", of course).

Headline writers love "on" because it is short and saves space. It is often used to mean "after", "about", "relating to" or "as a result of". Here are two recent examples from the Financial Times (FT):

• Crude above $110 on Iran sanctions
• Risk assets stay firm on Europe optimism
  

The first headline was referring to the price of crude oil, which rose "after the European Union approved an embargo on Iranian oil from 1 July". There we are again: "embargo on...". No escape, as I said.

The second headline reported that, as a result of the "recent improvement in sentiment towards the eurozone", so-called "risk assets", which includes company shares, held their value.

Then there was this headline, also in the FT, which managed to include "on" twice. The International Monetary Fund was telling the European Central Bank that it — just like private investors — should accept losses on its holdings of Greek debt:

• IMF calls on ECB to take hit on Greek debt
  

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron was denying that his government was complacent "after official data showed the UK economy contracted slightly in the last quarter of 2011":

•  PM says ‘no complacency’ on economy

On and on the examples go. And returning to the topic of risk, financial writers and analysts now divide market sentiment into one of two moods, which seems to change daily, if not hourly.

The first mood is one in which investors want to avoid risk and put their money into safe assets, such as gold or the dollar. The second mood is one in which investors feel confident about taking risks again and favour, for example, equities.

And the names given to these two moods? You guessed correctly: "risk-off" and "risk-on". Go on — have fun spotting the word and its different meanings.