It was hyperbolic, yes, but only a little, I think. The point I was making is that we've drunk a lot of koolaid about corporations being legal persons, as having rights, etc., such that no one bats an eye at anthropomorphisms like "the suffering of a company". My claim is that a) those words in that context are anthropomorphisms, metaphors, and b) that I don't think we've had much of a conversation about the koolaid I'm alluding to. (Outside of wealthy educated elites like ourselves, I mean.)

Nobody talks about “the suffering of a company” - that’s a made up example.

People do say things like ‘the company suffered losses’, but isn’t anthropomorphising.

A company is just a group of people right? Like people talk about the plight of the Syrian people or whatever. What's the difference?

Maybe we're getting a little philosophical here, but I don't believe inanimate entities can experience "difficulty" or "misfortune".

Would you say that a rock suffers "misfortune" if it topples off a cliff into the sea? Is it "difficult" for a glacier to maintain its integrity in the face of global warming? Is my car unfortunate to have been scratched in a parking lot? (OK, I do believe that last one, but I'm anthropomorphising my car to talk about my own human misfortune)

Definitely philosophical. If we can use statements like “a business had a bad quarter” and “a business had a good quarter” and understand that these mean that the financial statements were negative/positive. It isn’t a stretch to say something like “a business has had 10 straight bad quarters” is a plight considering a business can cease to exist.

Is a group of people an inanimate entity to you? Are there only certain types of groups of people that you think are an animate entity?

If you want to get really pedantic about it, a company is not a "group of people": a company is a particular legal structure for organising a profit-making enterprise. So yes, it is an inanimate entity.

When we say things like "that Lions football team suffered a crushing defeat", we're engaging in metonymy -- referring to the suffering of the members of the team but speaking metaphorically about "the team".

We'll have to agree to disagree here. I don't think whatever arbitrary legal structure there is around a group of people somehow makes the organization not human.

For example, I think it's perfectly normalized to say "that Detroit Lions team suffered a crushing defeat", even though the Detroit Lions are a profit-making enterprise.

I'll go with, there is a group of people involved with a corporation, but it's largely decoupled from the corporation itself.

The group of people are the labourers being exploited, and they're separate from the group of owners that the corporation represents.

Good point, I can think of 1 right away: Toys-R-Us. Miss having them around!