Since business depends on optimism and suspension of skepticism, expressions suggesting things may be somewhat sub-hunky-dory are of great concern. Hence such cutesy locutions as "the R word," or namby-pambyisms such as "slowdown," "downturn," "pullback," "slump" and "pause."

Risk Management : The conviction that young men and women with PhDs in mathematics can write formulas for such derivatives as SIVs (see below) so that they are financially fail-safe. It was believed until late 2007 that risk could be so well managed that it would be possible to lend billions of dollars to deadbeats, would-be bankrupts, near paupers, irresponsible speculators, doddering old people, uninformed immigrants, drunks and people seeking funds for a South American vacation and still make a profit.

Structured Investment Vehicle (SIV) : SIV drivers have been known to vanish when hit by one of Wall Street's IEDs (improvised explosive devices). The vehicle is inherently risky.

A financial institution buys a bunch of bonds that pay a fixed rate of interest and may take twenty years to mature. ("Mature" is finance lingo for the date when the bonds pay back the principal.) The institution buying the bonds must borrow to pay for them, and if it is to make money on this deal, it must pay less interest than it is receiving from the bonds. It has to borrow short-term loans because they generally carry lower interest rates. Though the difference between what the bonds pay the institution and what the institution must pay on the short-term loans is only .25 percent, if the money involved is in the billions, an SIV can be very profitable.

It can also blow up in your face. If the interest rates on the short-term loans suddenly jump up or there are no short-term loans to be had, the SIV swerves off Prosperity Highway and smashes into a tree, which is what happened beginning in late 2007.

Toxic Waste : A piece of financial crap. This is Wall Street slang for a security so lousy that only an older person suffering from age-related macular degeneration with second-stage Alzheimer's on Social Security could be induced to buy it.

Variable Pricing : The irksome but indispensable practice of charging more when demand is highest and less when it is lowest. Electrical utilities have been using variable pricing in one form or another for 100 years. Airlines do it and operators of toll roads are beginning to do it. Your neighborhood tavern, with its happy-hour special, is practicing an inebriated form of variable pricing.

Variable pricing is a means to achieve what is called "load balancing," by charging more to discourage everybody from using a service at peak demand time. Hence airline tickets cost less for off-hours flights and more for the convenient morning and afternoon departures. If everybody flew at the same time, airports would have to be tripled in size, airlines would have to buy four times as many planes and the cost of tickets would leap commensurately.

People who find variable pricing discriminatory, unfair and/or biased racially, religiously or by social class or sexual orientation are advised to look into the purchase of private jets, a form of transportation the pricing for which is invariable and invariably high. (Also see Zone Pricing.)

VIX : It sounds like Vicks VapoRub, the gooey substance the great grandmothers of America used to rub on the chests of children with flu. Vicks may be more useful than VIX, which is the ticker symbol for Volatility Index, another Wall Street will o' the wisp. Thanks to mathematical abracadabra, VIX is believed to predict how fast and how violently the price of stocks will gyrate up and down in the coming thirty-day period.

The theory is, the greater the ups and downs, the more dangerous the market is for investor sheep. Those are the human ovines who have talked themselves into believing that they know how to buy a share of stock when it's cheap and sell it when it is expensive.

A small class of little-known investors exist who make money regardless of the direction the stock is heading in. You are not one of them.

Zone Pricing : Equality does not exist in business unless thrust on it from the outside. All customers are not equal, so do not appeal to the "rights of man" when you learn that a drug costs more in America than it does in Canada. Zone pricing means that things have different prices in different places. It is a geographical application of charging what the traffic will bear, depending on where the traffic is. (Also see Variable Pricing.)