TheCorporateCounsel.net

If you’re a banking analyst, I hope you studied your SAT vocab words! According to the WSJ, BofA’s CEO Brian Moynihan intentionally throws “obscure, archaic words fit for novelists or judges of bygone centuries” in his earnings call scripts. Delightful!

It’s no happenstance that Moynihan regularly jams words such as “gainsay,” “concomitant” and “fantods” into otherwise ordinary sentences when he addresses the street [. . .] Moynihan challenges himself to find a way to use certain vocabulary words on the calls, the people said. The more arcane, the better.

Moynihan has more than once used “gainsay,” or to declare something as untrue or invalid. One quarter he said the bank saw strong adviser productivity and “concomitant” growth in fee-based assets. Another quarter he said he didn’t “get fantods,” or rather that he wasn’t nervous. “A perspicacious analyst might wonder whether talk of inflation, recession and other factors would fructify in a slower spending growth,” Moynihan said in an analyst call in 2022.

While this may not be something other companies try (the article says transcript services can’t always keep up and throw in totally unrelated words!), the liberal arts major in me loves the idea of earnings calls being a reason to pull up the OED online to look up words! How wonderful in an age of so many AI slop summaries! Reading this article made me want to read more Michael Chabon books. Or The Stand by Stephen King. (I swear teachers and prep programs used to recommend that students read The Stand to study for the vocab portion of the SAT, but I can’t find any evidence of this on the internet!)

If this post seems a little silly and academic, it’s because it’s the last week of summer and that’s how I’m feeling! Like Meaghan, I am VERY READY for back-to-school this year.

Whether you’re feeling ready or not, to all with student-age children in the same boat, I wish you some lovely last days / weeks of summer, a smooth return to academics (plus sports, music, clubs, etc.), an easy carpool schedule and decent sleep for all!

– Meredith Ervine