penciled out + fired

[Dan Goncharoff]

"It was never penciled out" would mean an analysis was never done.

"It never penciled out" means the analyses never indicated that the
firm would be able to make money -- it never worked out on paper.

DanG



On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 10:26 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: penciled out + fired
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 9/26/2011 07:06 AM, Dave Wilton wrote:
>>This use of "penciled out" is quite common in investment circles. I've heard
>>it hundreds of times and never in the passive. It's use in this case is akin
>>to "the numbers [don't] add up."
>
> So "penciled out" is a negative, implying rejection?  Or does
> "penciled out" mean "sketched, outlined, but not finalized" (akin to
> "I've penciled it in to my appointment book"), in contrast to
> something "inked in"?
>
> Joel
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
>>Victor Steinbok
>>Sent: Monday, September 26, 2011 5:04 AM
>>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>>Subject: penciled out + fired
>>
>>I came across this and started scratching my head.
>>
>>http://goo.gl/2Q7nc
>> > "It was revolutionary," said Walter Bailey, a former Macquarie Capital
>> > investment banker who specialized in green technology and visited
>> > Solyndra in 2008. "You had some of the smartest money in the world
>> > getting behind it. It was a real company with a huge factory and an
>> > extremely unique product.
>> > "The only problem," said Bailey, now a senior partner at boutique
>> > investment bank Focus Capital in New York, "was that it never penciled
>> > out."
>>
>>It's fairly obvious what "never penciled out" means here, although I
>>would have expected a passive construction here ("was penciled out" or
>>"had been penciled out"). But, as it stood, the precise meaning was
>>elusive. None of the usual dictionary sources (certainly not the
>>OED--nothing even remotely related there) were helpful.
>>
>>Farlex Financial Dictionary is the only one (unsurprisingly) that came
>>through:
>>
>> > A slang expression for a rough analysis of the viability of an
>> > investment.
>>
>>Still, it seems that it should have worked out to a passive... The
>>meaning seems to be "the numbers never worked out", which is a bit
>>different from "the rough viability analysis was never done"--which is
>>what one would get from the Farlex definition, passivized.
>>
>>I am also wondering if the writer got confused himself when putting the
>>piece together. The quote from Baily is broken in an odd way--I would
>>have expected the "was" to be included in the first piece, not delayed
>>for the second. It's as if the author /expected/ "was" to be in the
>>second piece--somewhere.
>>
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