No investor would ever admit to being a perma-bear - or a perma-bull for that matter - because the terms imply an unattractive level of intransigence: Their views won't change, no matter what the facts are. Still, it's good fun to slap the "perma" prefix on others.

Barry Ritholtz, at the Big Picture, has a fantastic post translating some of the more common terms used by the perma-bear. Some examples:

Bonds: An asset class that will eventually be worthless paper as its value is inflated away, but in the meantime, are a good alternative to equities.

China: The centrally planned communist economy that is the model for Free Market Economies in the West. alt. An idealized form of Capitalism.

Death Cross: The most reliable and certain technical formation known to man. See also Golden Cross: An old wives' tale, not to paid attention to or taken seriously at all.

Housing Bottom: A theoretical but mathematically impossible construct.

QE 2: A code word or shorthand for the event that has been prophesied to bring about the End of the World. Interchangeable with "Apocalypse" as Perma-bears regard both its coming and its destructive power as a quasi-religious inevitability.

Mr. Ritholtz is having some fun, of course. But he raises an interesting point: Are perma-bears (and bulls) merely seeing what they want to see?

Personally, I don't see it this way. I think some of these intransigent views - when they are expressed coherently - serve to remind investors that there is another way of looking at the economy and the stock market. You don't have to listen to them, but these alternative views should be weighed. They make your own convictions about the market that much stronger.