I have been to an interview today. Like everyone else, I also need to eat and get warm clothes for myself, so I attended an interview at the world’s leading investment bank, Morgan Stanley. You may not have realised, but I am a financial guru, a master of numeracy, a genious of investment banking, or at least this is what I project of myself if I want to eat… I am just a linguist with 5 years of experience as an accountant. Nice to go schizophrenic.

Ready for the new challenge, I went to their one-day “Assessment Centre,” as these multi’s call these torture chambers, and listened to the inspiring, motivating presentations. I must admit, all of them were really nice people, credit due to them for their welcoming manners and great HR policies. Let us hope I live to experience it.

However, at one point, I seemed to have lost the line of thought of a great future projected to me on the wall. I heard a phrase that seemed weird only to me, as no one else raised an eyebrow (maybe simply I did not see as I was sitting in the back row ready to fall asleep.)
This was the phrase I heard: Morgan Stanley is “A leading market-maker in spot and forward currencies, as well as vanilla and exotic options.” This combination of culinary pleasures with financial market and currency evaluation did not quite fit into my “very experienced accountant vocabulary.”

I immediately woke up in the back row, and thought I would rush home and share it with you. However, I guess you may know a lot more about these terms than I do. Why am I trying to play the smart then? Well, only to find out at the end of my investigation that everyone else knows these phrases, I am the only one left out. Never mind, one can always learn till death - as we say it very optimistically in Hungary. Well, I just want to know what this is, to share some of this investigation with linguists new to the world of finance.

I got hyper about all that you can have with a simple vanilla.

Some etymology of the word Vanilla from OED Etymological Dictionary:
vanilla
“1662, from Sp. vainilla “vanilla plant,” lit. “little pod,” dim. of vaina “sheath,” from L. vagina “sheath” (see vagina). So called from the shape of the pods. European discovery 1521 by Hernando Cortes’ soldiers on reconnaissance in southeastern Mexico. Meaning “conventional, of ordinary sexual preferences” is 1970s, from notion of whiteness and the common choice of vanilla ice cream. Vanillin is from 1868.” Vanilla. Douglas Harper. November, 2001. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=vanilla&searchmode=none.

According to OED, you can have vanilla sex for a start. Wikipedia says: “Vanilla sex or conventional sex is used to describe what a culture regards as standard or conventional sexual behavior.”
Vanilla Sex. Unknown. March, 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_sex>.

Wikipedia further adds: “The term “vanilla” derives from the use of vanilla extract as the basic flavoring for ice cream, and by extension meaning “plain” or “conventional”. Thus, the term “vanilla” is sometimes used as an insult to describe someone who is overly conventional or unwilling to take risks, in both sexual and non-sexual contexts.” ibid.

Never heard of this, this is not something they teach at the University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. They teach much worse but that is another thing (this would be much ado about nothing - we all know what “nothing” meant for Shakespeare.)

Let us get serious here about some very important financial operations. I do have this vision of guiding lay linguists towards becoming Stock Market #1’s in New York.
When we talk about Vanilla Option in finance, we (or I should say those who really understand it) really mean an option which has no special or unusual features. There is besides the Plain Vanilla Option, just to make things more complicated. To get this sound more professional, a quote: “The most basic or standard version of a financial instrument, usually options, bonds, futures and swaps. Its opposite is an exotic instrument, which alters the components of a traditional financial instrument, resulting in a more complex security.” Plain Vanilla. Investopedia Inc. 2007. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/plainvanilla.asp

If you opt for the Plain Vanilla Option, you generally have the standard type of option with a simple expiration date along with strike price, offering no additional features.

Let us not go into what an exotic instrument is, I can’t even rephrase what they say about it, so to avoid plagiarism, I suggest we should just leave it to the bankers.

Another interesting vanilla is Vanilla SNOBOL. And I guess you are dying to know what SNOBOL stands for. It is StriNg Oriented symBOlic Language. This processing language was developed by Ralph Griswold and associates at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ. It was used for text processing and complier development. They introduced the first version in 1963.

Somehow all that seems to be related with vanilla has a dull, boring connotation. Things vanilla seem to have little variation, basic features, and conventionality. Vanilla softwer is an example for this. It is a computer software that is used by a given business without having any specific customisations to it. Contrary to this would be ERP’s, Enterprise Resource Planning systems, but I really leave those to the computer literate.

See, so much meaning is hidden behind an innocent Morgan Stanley interview.

And we have not talked about Vanilla Sky and gorgeous Tom yet.

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