FIT English Conversation is not bankrupt: Conversation and reading together

Here’s the link for our meeting; there is no PW: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87881977466

After our usual small talk, with ideas, experiences, and questions supplied by YOU, our main topic is BANKRUPTCY! I’ve included below an illustrated discussion of where the English word comes from and the different ways it can be used. We will read through this article together, practicing idioms together.

Meanwhile, enjoy the cherry blossoms!
All the best,
Susan

LIFE & WORK IDEAS WORD ON THE STREET ‘Bankrupt’: A Broken Bench Became a Sign of Failure By Ben Zimmer WSJ March 24, 2023
Business headlines in times of financial stress can be dominated by news of bankruptcies. These days, we hear about big firms filing for bankruptcy protection when they go belly up, like the fallen giant of the cryptocurrency Money- world, FTX. More recently, the former parent company of the failed Silicon Valley Bank has been making its case in bankruptcy court.

Individuals, too, can garner media attention for going bankrupt, especially in high-profile cases like that of Alex Jones, the right-wing media host who filed for personal bankruptcy after he was ordered to pay more than $1.4 billion in damages for defaming families victimized by the Sandy Hook school massacre.
Regardless of whether it is a big corporation or an insolvent person seeking financial protection for going bankrupt, federal laws allow courts to determine whether debts can be discharged without repayment. But where did the idea of “going bankrupt” come from in the first place?

The story of the word “bankrupt” starts in medieval Florence, at a time when it was a major center of commerce. Money-changers set up benches or benchlike counters for doing business in public places, with the bench called a “banca” in Italian. Legend has it that when a Florentine trader did not have enough money to pay what was owed, the bench would be broken so that no more business could be transacted. The broken bench was known to Italians as a “banca rotta.”
The “rotta” part of the phrase might seem to suggest the English word “rotten.” But its origin is actually from the Latin verb “rumpere” meaning “to break,” which also has the form “ruptus” meaning “broken.” The same Latin root is the source of such words as “rupture,” “corrupt” and “interrupt.”
That old Italian bench is also the source of our word “bank” for a financial institution, since “banca” got applied to a shop where a money-changer conducted business. (The “bank” of a river is etymologically related, and may go back to an image of the sloped earth near a body of water being shaped like a seat.) And the idea of breaking a trader’s bench also got transferred to such English expressions as “go broke” and “break the bank.”
The Italian form passed through French as “banqueroute” on its way to English. When the word entered the English lexicon in the 16th century, it got spelled as “bankrupt” by scribes who thought it should look more like Latin “ruptus.”

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In its earliest use, “bankrupt” was a noun referring to a person who has run out of money. In William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” the moneylender Shylock sharpens his knife as he eyes the cash-strapped merchant Antonio, saying he wants to “cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt there.”

“Bankrupt” quickly developed as an adjective meaning “unable to pay one’s debts” and as a verb meaning “to make someone bankrupt.” While “bankruptcy” got formalized into legal codes to determine whether a failing business had to pay its obligations, more figurative meanings of “bankrupt” also took root in the language. A person bereft of some good quality could be described as “bankrupt,” as when a character in Richard Sheridan’s 1775 comic play “The Rivals” declares, “I am bankrupt in gratitude!”

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Sometimes the metaphorical sense of “bankrupt” can echo the old financial use. In 2021, when Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified to Congress, she not only called her former employer “morally bankrupt” but also suggested that Facebook should “declare moral bankruptcy” so that “we can figure out how to fix these things together.” If there were such a thing as “moral bankruptcy court,” that would give new meaning to the idea of paying your debt to society.