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Reader question: Please explain this sentence, particularly “in the doghouse”: “The stock market has been in the doghouse, with the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index tumbling 29 percent in three weeks…” My comments: Plainly put, the stock market has been in a freefall and investors don’t like it. Who can blame them? When people put money into the stock market, they have only one single purpose in mind and that is to make money. They can only make money when the prices of the shares they buy go up. When prices fall – as steeply as in our example sentence, sliding close to 30 percent in three weeks – people are understandably unhappy, to put it mildly. I mean, a lot of investors must be mad and angry. But anyways, we are not here to cheer them up or to warn them off the field altogether, we’ll be satisfied if we are able to get to grips with “in the doghouse” the phrase. “In the doghouse” is an American expression. Imagine an American husband and wife are having a quarrel and the woman says to the man: “Now get out and go sleep with the dog in the doghouse.” The dog, the family dog that is, lives in its hut out in the yard. Understandably the dog’s hut or house is less well built than the family dwelling and hence make uncomfortable living for a human. The long and short of it is, when the husband is ordered to go into the doghouse, he is temporarily expelled from her company. | 
