Derrida’s intervention was to suggest that the line between metaphor and other elements of speech is “always already” blurred. This is in contrast to analytic theories that see metaphor as merely a second-order element of speech, an artificial creative substitution of meaning used for stylistic purposes. Derrida argues that a large number of the words we use every day were once metaphors, and that metaphor is a process at the very core of language. Take, for instance, the word investment. It stems from the Latin vestire, from which we also derive the word vest: it means to dress or to cloak oneself. Early-modern Italian merchants used this as a metaphor for the different profitable purposes to which money could be put – they were dressing their money up when they lent it to trading or manufacturing ventures that would bring a favourable return. This metaphor resonated, and the word invest became independent of its original meanings, folding into living language. It began to become what linguists call a dead metaphor, a metaphor whose metaphoric quality has disappeared or goes unremarked or unobserved. Lo and behold, by the late 20th century investment not only named the most profitable activity in a hyper-financialized global capitalist economy, but was increasingly borrowed as a metaphor to explain all manner of activities in our social lives.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 66