Unusual risks
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The title of Sal Mercogliano's latest "What's Going on With Shipping?" vlog offers two idiom extensions: "Understanding Global Shipping Risks: Black Swans, Black Jellyfish & Black Elephants".
The "black swan" metaphor starts from Juvenal (Satire VI, line 165), who described a virtuous wife as "Rara auis in terris, nigroque simillima cycno ("a rare bird on earth, and very like a black swan"). This made sense in 1st-century Rome, because the only swans the Romans knew were white.
Actual black swans are found in Australia, first reported to Europeans by the Dutch around 1697, and described scientifically in 1790. But the "black swan" idiom has continued to be used up to the present day, in the sense of (what Wiktionary calls) "Something believed impossible or not to exist, especially if an example is subsequently found". Thus a book published in 1847 asserted that "Among the most refined of the ancients, an educated woman was a sort of black swan, an object of curiosity and amazement".
A version of that interpretation was codified by Nassim Nichalas Taleb's 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
Mercogliano glosses his own extensions this way:
- Black Swan Events: Rare, unpredictable events with catastrophic impacts, such as the Ever Given Suez Canal blockage and the Baltimore bridge collapse involving the Dali.
- Black Jellyfish Events: Small, known risks that accumulate to create a massive disruption, highlighted by the impact of global tariffs and the persistent Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.
- Black Elephant Events: Large-scale, highly probable threats that are often ignored until they "trample" the system, exemplified by the tensions and potential chokepoint in the Strait of Hormuz.
Thus he's generalized the idiom beyond swans, to "black ANIMAL", in the sense of something that people didn't expect, with the nature of the unexpected event metaphorically linked to the stereotypical characteristics of the named animal. (And maybe algae or seaweed would work better than jellyfish for his second category?)
No other examples of this style of metaphor extension come to mind, though I'm sure they're Out There.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 29, 2026 @ 9:26 am
I think that modern sense (at least Taleb's) of "black swan" fits the zoology well – I was as a child aware that black swans did exist, but primarily on the other side of the planet from the northeastern U.S. so that the odds that any swan I might personally encounter would be black were very remote, yet still non-zero. Presumably if I'd grown up in Perth I wouldn't think it nearly as good a metaphor for that.
Tye S Power said,
August 29, 2026 @ 9:53 am
I have become a regular listener to Sal's updates. Intelligent and informed commentary on an aspect of the economy I knew little about before. His style is cheerful and apolitical, which is refreshing. He plays with language a lot. He would probably like Language Log. Glad to see him get a shout out here.
Thomas Hutcheson said,
August 29, 2026 @ 10:00 am
As a writer of a Substack,
Radical Centrist® https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/
I can see incorporating the Black [sterotypical animal] in my analyses woul be useful!
Thanks for the tip!
Kim said,
August 29, 2026 @ 10:56 am
Let's not forget the Black (Animal) event that we're all most likely to encounter many times in our lives, directly:
Black Cat Events: Small, furry risks that nocturnally insert themselves in front of your feet to create a headlong plunge down a flight of stairs.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 29, 2026 @ 12:28 pm
I did not know whether black jellyfish were actually a thing in the actual ocean, so I consulted the internet and was given the wikipedia article on "Chrysaora achlyos, the black sea nettle, sometimes informally known as the black jellyfish," found off the Pacific Coast of North America, primarily in southern California and Baja. The article asserts that "Despite the distinctive nature of this species and its abundance when present, it was only recently officially described and is actually the largest invertebrate to have been described in the 20th century." Which I guess makes it a good metaphor for something that gets habitually overlooked until it's actually causing you a problem?
Sea nettles (Chrysaora), FWIW, are themselves described as "a genus of jellyfish," so it's not as if the "informal" name can be prescriptively peeved at as wrong from a taxonomic perspective rather at worst imprecise.
Yves Rehbein said,
August 29, 2026 @ 12:38 pm
Old Mac Donald is going to have a field day with this. Swan go sing, Jellyfish go sting, elephant go stomp, stonks go brrrr …
Now that I said that, I could think of Black Friday, if that's what you mean.
Scott Underwood said,
August 29, 2026 @ 12:42 pm
A business-world example of metaphor extension began with referring to the rare startup companies valued at over $1 billion as "unicorns." (Unicorns are nonexistent, not rare, but never mind.)
Wikipedia lists several direct extensions to unicorn, including minicorn, soonicorn, decacorn, kilocorn, etc. The phrase can also be combined: a green unicorn is a $1B eco-conscious startup.
Other creatures have been put to use, with startups called camels (able to survive harsh conditions), zebras (balancing profit with social or environmental action), and centaurs (something something $100 million).
MattF said,
August 29, 2026 @ 3:38 pm
The ‘Law of Truly Large Numbers’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_truly_large_numbers
is clearly meant to be an extension of the usual Law of Large Numbers.
DaveK said,
August 29, 2026 @ 5:07 pm
It seems similar to affixing “-gate” to the name of any scandal, where any literal semantic connection is lost.
NW said,
August 29, 2026 @ 5:34 pm
The loss of metaphorical meaning of 'black' (the usual term is 'bleaching' but that would seem odd here) reminds me of dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is generally regarded as some kind of matter which doesn't interact with light, so is dark. Both words in their literal sense. But we don't actually know what dark matter is, so 'dark energy' uses 'dark' in a transferred, bleached sense: energy where we don't know what it is.
JPL said,
August 30, 2026 @ 8:01 pm
I thought the "black swan" example was all about categories, natural kinds, the structure of "definitions", intensions (the logical necessity of criteria), and deductive (as opposed to inductive) validity. In this respect the parallels with "black jellyfish" and "black elephants" are not there, since for the latter two, their color has not conventionally been part of their "definition". A related case is the Tarskian truth schema '"Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white.' And then somebody says, "But this snow here is yellow!".
Brett said,
August 31, 2026 @ 10:24 am
@DaveK: Watergategate
Ross Presser said,
August 31, 2026 @ 12:18 pm
I probably don't even need to list these, but here goes, a partial list of other "black " expressions:
Black sheep: unwelcome member of a family
Black dog: metaphor for depression or a ghostly creature
Black Turkey: Gradual deterioration mistaken for stability until collapse occurs. Inspired by Taleb's turkey, which is fed every day and concludes humans are benevolent right up until Thanksgiving.
wgj said,
August 31, 2026 @ 1:36 pm
The black swan referred to an actual rare animal, but why are the metaphorical siblings all black as well? Just because they describe catastrophes? I thought we decided to stop using "black" to mean "bad" due to the racial undertones of that linguistic tradition?
Also, never heard of the Grey Rhino? They really don't need to be black.
Philip Taylor said,
August 31, 2026 @ 2:32 pm
"I thought we decided to stop using "black" to mean "bad" due to the racial undertones of that linguistic tradition ?" — I'm pretty sure that gentlemen's clubs still routinely blackball undesirable applicants for membership, and equally sure that items, people, practices, etc., are routinely blacklisted.
DaveK said,
August 31, 2026 @ 8:22 pm
@Philip Taylor: I think the most common one these days is “black market”, (which has given rise to “gray market” and “white market”. It may be tolerable because the metaphor is heard as “without illumination”, as in “dark web” rather than dark in color.
wgj said,
August 31, 2026 @ 9:47 pm
@Philip: At least in the IT world, "blacklist" and "whitelist" have been thoroughly replaced by "denylist" and "allowlist". Making this change is now the default, while not not doing so constitutes a conscious anti-woke stance that only a small minority is comfortable taking. This movement has been so prominent that nobody in IT could feint ignorance and plausibly claim that they've never heard of the controversy.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
September 1, 2026 @ 7:43 am
You know… "black" people aren't really black and "white" people aren't really white. Can we have our primary color words back now?
Philip Taylor said,
September 1, 2026 @ 9:38 am
I spent most of my working life in IT, wgj, and all of my retirement, and I have never heard of "denylist" or "allowlist". I would use "blacklist" without hesitation, and also "whitelist".
Philip Taylor said,
September 1, 2026 @ 9:41 am
Well, I clearly work with my brain disabled. Malwarebytes uses "Allow list" and I have never noticed the fact.
wgj said,
September 1, 2026 @ 11:00 am
From Wikipedia entry on "blacklist (computing)":
In 2018, a journal commentary on a report on predatory publishing was released which claimed that "white" and "black" are racially-charged terms that need to be avoided in instances such as "whitelist" and "blacklist", and that the first recorded usage of "blacklist" was during "the time of mass enslavement and forced deportation of Africans to work in European-held colonies in the Americas". The article hit mainstream in Summer 2020 following the George Floyd protests in the United States.
A number of technology companies replaced "whitelist" and "blacklist" with new alternatives such as "allow list" and "deny list", alongside similar terminology changes regarding the terms "Master" and "Slave". For example, in August 2018, Ruby on Rails changed all occurrences of "blacklist" and "whitelist" to "restricted list" and "permitted list". Other companies responded to this controversy in June and July 2020:
– GitHub announced that it would replace many "terms that may be offensive to developers in the black community".
– Apple Inc. announced at its developer conference that it would be adopting more inclusive technical language and replacing the term "blacklist" with "deny list" and the term "whitelist" with "allow list".
– Linux Foundation said it would use neutral language in kernel code and documentation in the future and avoid terms such as "blacklist" and "slave" going forward.
– The Twitter Engineering team stated its intention to move away from a number of terms, including "blacklist" and "whitelist".
– Red Hat announced that it would make open source more inclusive and avoid these and other terms.
ZDNet reports that the list of technology companies making such decisions "includes Twitter, GitHub, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Ansible, Red Hat, Splunk, Android, Go, MySQL, PHPUnit, Curl, OpenZFS, Rust, JP Morgan, and others."
The issue and subsequent changes caused controversy in the computing industry, where "whitelist" and "blacklist" are prevalent (e.g. IP whitelisting). Those that oppose these changes question the term's attribution to race, claiming that the term "blacklist" arose from the practice of using black books in medieval England.
Rodger C said,
September 2, 2026 @ 10:02 am
"terms that may be offensive to developers in the black community"? I'd say they're offensive to anyone with a basic understanding of society and history. Not a description of your average tech engineer?
HS said,
September 2, 2026 @ 10:39 pm
Typical Northern Hemisphere bias!! Where I come from the vast majority of swans are black, and any white swans are in fact, er, "black swans". (And since as an inhabitant of the Southern Hemisphere I find Northern Hemisphere bias unacceptable and offensive and insulting and discriminatory, I propose, following wgj's logic, that we get rid of the blatantly hemispherist words "north" and "south". I'm afraid both North and South Carolina and North and South Dakota are going to have to go! (I'll personally be rather sad to see South Carolina go because I won't be able to play Hickory Wind any more, but never mind, it's got to go.) )
Like JPL, I am more familiar with the term "black swan" in the philosophical context of categories, definitions, natural kinds, and inductive reasoning, rather than Taleb's economic sense of rare, improbable events with catastrophic impacts. But while colour is part of the definition of a (philosophical) black swan, it is of course not the case with actual (biological Australian) Black Swans. Australian Black Swans could all acquire a genetic mutation and become white, but they would still be Australian Black Swans (though someone might suggest changing the name). And the quotation from Juvenal given by Professor Liberman shows that the Romans did not consider whiteness to be essential to swanness either, since they could consider the possibility of a black swan (even if only with reference to such an inferior being as a woman).
In the philosophical context, if we are considering black animals, there are also Black Ravens, in the form of the well-known Black Raven Paradox (though the ravens aren't a metaphor, just a very good example). (For what it's worth, I've always thought the obvious resolution of the Black Raven Paradox lies in the concept of natural kinds – inductive reasoning is reasonable when we recognize we are dealing with a natural kind, and ravens constitute a natural kind while non-black objects and non-ravens obviously do not. But the example of the Australian Black Swan shows that our assumption about what constitutes a natural kind can be wrong – the relevant natural kind in the case of swan colour turns out to be the species, not the genus, and the genus is presumably what the Roman would have considered swans even if they presumably lacked the concept of a biological genus.)
While philosophical black swans obviously don't refer to real black swans, inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere (oops, sorry, Top-Of-The-Conventionally-Oriented–Globe Hemisphere) may be interested to know that real Australian Black Swans actually have white flight feathers on their wings – I'm not sure what metaphorical significance can be found in that. Also, Black Swan chicks are actually white (or at least light grey) – again, I'm not sure what the metaphorical significance of that might be. And finally, I have no idea what Taleb or Mercogliano would make of this.
My home country of New Zealand provides a perfect example of a black animal that really ought to serve as a metaphor but doesn't (yet), and that is the Black Robin (or Chatham Island Robin). Like most of New Zealand's native birds, Black Robins were seriously affected by introduced predators, and by the late 1970's they were reduced to a single tiny remnant population in a tiny wind-swept patch of degraded forest on a single tiny inaccessible island, consisting of 5 birds and only one fertile female, an elderly bird known as Old Blue Old Blue after the colour of her leg bands. In the late 1970's a team of heroic conservation officers heroic conservation officers from the New Zealand Wildlife Service stepped in (or rather rowed in), scaled the island's cliffs, captured all the remaining birds and transferred them to a larger nearby island, where they began an intensive breeding management program in which they would remove the first-laid eggs from the robins' nests and place them in the nests of another bird species, the tomtit, which would hatch the chicks and foster-raise them. Meanwhile the robins would lay a new clutch of eggs to raise. Today the Black Robin population consists of around 300 birds, all of which descend from Old Blue, the saviour of her species and a true hero. Both the Black Robin and Old Blue are well known in New Zealand as symbols of conservation – books have been written about Old Blue and when she passed away in 1983 her death was announced in parliament. "Black Robin" and "Old Blue" have actually entered the language as metaphors as far as I know, but they fully deserve to! In Taleb's terms, a "Black Robin" could represent a company or other entity on the brink of collapse which somehow miraculously manages to recover, while an "Old Blue" could represent some kind of devoted saviour figure who single-handedly rescues a failing company. (Though having said that, the conservationist in me would actually hate to see either the Black Robin or Old Blue associated with the tawdry word of economics or business.)
Of course, Professor Liberman wasn't actually asking about extra examples of "Black [animal]" used as a metaphor; he was asking about other examples of this kind of metaphorical extension. One very good example that springs to mind is green-wash, pink-wash, and red-wash (and possibly others). These seem to me like an almost exact parallel with black-swan, black-jellyfish, and black-elephant events. The black swan starts as a literal black swan, turns into a metaphorical black swan, then is expanded sideways by taking the metaphorical prefix "black" and appending it to the vaguely metaphorical jellyfish and elephants to produce metaphorical black jellyfish events and black elephant events. Similarly white-wash starts as literal white-wash, turns into metaphorical white-wash, and then is expanded sideways by taking the metaphorical suffix "wash" and appending to it metaphorical green, pink, and red to produce the metaphorical green-wash, pink-wash, and red-wash.
But hang on – am I allowed to use the term "white-wash"? Isn't it racist?! Which brings us to the absurd nonsense put forward by wgj.
I can think of many words and phrases beginning with "black" where "black" has a negative connotation. In addition to blackball and blacklist mentioned by wjg and Philip Taylor there are blackmail, blackjack, blackleg, black sheep, Black Friday, black market, black dog, Black Mass, Black Sabbath, and blackguard (and that's just off the top of my head – there are probably dozens more). To suggest that these words are are somehow racist (or even worse, to suggest that people who use them are somehow racist, though to be fair wgj doesn't go far) seems to me to be stupid, ridiculous, ludicrous, and frankly grossly insulting to the intelligence of normal English speakers such as myself who use these words all the time. They have absolutely no connection with "black" in the racial sense, for **** sake. The symbolic association of "white" with good and "black" with bad seems to me to be a perfectly natural one and obviously derives from day and night, light and dark. Night is dark and scary (as are caves, dungeons, tunnels, etc) and full of evil witches and demons; day is light and bright and illuminating, and all those scary witches and demons go away. Is that really too hard to understand? I wouldn't be at all surprised if the association of "white" with good and "black" with bad is a very common one amongst the world's languages, and the use of "black" and "white" in this way also fits in with what I think is an innate human tendency towards a binary Manichean world-view. It is grossly insulting to the intelligence of people to think that they would somehow take these as racist terms or are somehow incapable of distinguishing between these terms and the use of "black" and "white" as racial categories.
I'm not an IT person and I'm not sure what "blacklist¨ and "whitelist¨ mean as technical terms in the IT world (in fact I don't think I've ever actually heard the word "whitelist" before, even in the non-IT world, though it is of course an obvious opposite of "blacklist"), but if parts of the ID industry have really banned or replaced them I find that simply surreal – it's like something out of a Monty Python sketch, although I doubt even Monty Python could come up with something so absurd (and they came up with the Ministry of Silly Walks). And as for "master" and "slave", assuming they mean in IT what I think they mean, they seem like the absolutely perfect terms to me. The metaphor is perfect, and surely even wgj can see that. (But hang on! I don't think I'm supposed to use the word "slave" these days – apparently I'm supposed to say "enslaved person" instead! So even if IT people keep the obvious master and slave metaphor they will presumably have to refer to an "enslaved device" now! The mind boggles!)
I'm a New Zealander, not an American (thank God), and I appreciate that this is an American blog and that most of its readers are American, and of course I understand that race relations are a serious and explosive issue in the United States and that Americans may therefore see these things differently, but honestly, can anybody actually take this absurd nonsense seriously? No offence to readers of Language Log, but sometimes I'm glad that I have the entire expanse of the Pacific Ocean (sorry, the American Ocean) between me and the surreal parallel universe that constitutes the present-day United States.
But hang on! Even as a New Zealander I probably can't escape this absurd nonsense. The names of many of our national sports teams incorporate the word "black" – the All Blacks (the national rugby team) and the Black Caps (the national cricket team) for example. Clearly those names have got to go…!
Philip Taylor said,
September 3, 2026 @ 3:55 am
Rodger — "I'd say they're offensive to anyone with a basic understanding of society and history". Really ? Let's take an obvious example : "to blacklist something/one". Do you really believe that "anyone with a basic understanding of society and history" would find that offensive ? If you do, then I respectfully disagree. It may well be that "[someone] with a basic understanding of society and history" might seek to avoid use of that phrase because it might offend someone else, but I do not believe that "anyone [or even most] with a basic understanding of society and history" would themselves find it offensive.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
September 3, 2026 @ 6:40 am
I'm with Philip on this one. If you excise from language any chromatic idiom that could potentially describe human beings (black-, brown-, red-, white-, yellow-; and one could make an argument that "blue-" targets depressives…), that would be a little, to use a linguistic term, "silly".
How about this?: If the _intent_ of an utterance, as judged from context and prior experience, is to harm or disparage, you've got yourself a bigot. If not, let's give people the benefit of the doubt.
Rodger C said,
September 3, 2026 @ 10:11 am
I apologize for "basic understanding of society and history," which was much too broad; I momentarily forgot that other people's society and history are quite different from mine, which is a particular American one. Philip Taylor's experiences have been very different from mine. Benjamin Orsatti's have I think been more similar, but I doubt that his parents were the son of a Klansman and the daughter of a crypto-Melungeon.
Rodger C said,
September 3, 2026 @ 10:22 am
Let me add that to me it's not the negativity of "blacklist" but the positivity of "whitelist" that sends up the, uh, red flag.
Philip Taylor said,
September 3, 2026 @ 11:43 am
"Send up the Communist flag" ? McCarthy shall hear of this !
Rodger C said,
September 3, 2026 @ 2:13 pm
Beneath its lists we'll live and die …
JPL said,
September 3, 2026 @ 5:45 pm
@HS:
"(oops, sorry, Top-Of-The-Conventionally-Oriented–Globe Hemisphere)"
I'm surprised you didn't condemn another example of unnecessarily offensive and insensitive "northern hemisphere bias", namely the expression "down under", to refer to, mainly, Australia, it seems, but probably also used in reference to New Zealand. The lyrics to the standard "All of you", for example, show the metaphorical extensions that may not be regarded as flattering, I don't know, at least as interpreted by some singers in the jazz tradition. There's also the expression "things started going south" to refer to deterioration. After all, 'down' is really just all about gravitational pull.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijfTvVCYoQY
HS said,
September 3, 2026 @ 7:06 pm
@JPL
yes, "down under" can refer to New Zealand as well as Australia, but when it's given capital letters as "Down Under" I tend to think of it as referring more exclusively to Australia.
"Things started going south" is another perfect example of blatant anti-southern-hemisphere bias! I'm afraid it's got to go! This hemispherist writing has got to stop!
I don't have any particular problem with the lyrics of All Of You. But regarding the jazz tradition, I've just learnt that Cassandra Wilson has died, and I'm in mourning.
p.s. reading through my long comment above again, I've noticed that it's full of typos. Sorry about that – I wrote it rather hurriedly, hacked it around a bit, and then had to rush off and didn't have time to proof-read it properly. Hopefully the typos didn't affect anybody's understanding of what I meant.
JPL said,
September 3, 2026 @ 8:26 pm
@HS:
Oh my, I was shocked, saddened and totally bereft yesterday about Cassandra Wilson, my favourite living singer before yesterday. Only 70! It calls for a video in remembrance. I could make a long Cassandra Wilson playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn_QrIj7x6o
I'm glad you have no problem with "All of you", but I hope you listened to the Madeline Eastman all the way through to get to the spicy parts in the improvisations.