Verbiage
Friday, 6 February 2009
VERBIAGE: “Speech or writing that uses too many words or excessively technical expressions.” (from 18th c. French verbier “to chatter”) — New Oxford American Dictionary
My days as a copywriter began in the early 1990s, and the word verbiage was already being carelessly thrown around like puppies at an Ozzy concert. I’m not sure who started the slow lexicide of the word, but it obviously began well before I was born:
“…use concise military verbiage…” — George S. Patton
As destructive with language as he was with the Germans, I would say. By the historic definition of verbiage, Patton’s patter constitutes a grotesque oxymoron; verbiage means over-wordy language, and by definition is not concise.
Why, then, do managers, politicians and other educated folk insist on verbiage when wording, word choice, or copy will do? Like with most other misuses, it probably began with a misunderstanding. We can imagine a thick-headed fellow somewhere (maybe it was Patton) being told to “shorten the verbiage” and taking it as a neutral statement rather than running to the dictionary, which is obviously where he needed to go. Pretentiousness also plays a hand in the lexicide of verbiage, as does that requirement of all business writing — the need to obfuscate.
So now, while the NOAD and Webster’s Revised Unabridged contain only the original (and in our estimation, true) meaning of verbiage, most other dictionaries include the new definition, for which there is a perfectly good and unmistakable synonym: wording. However, verbiage as a word expressing disgust with overly flowery language was already dead by the 1990s when I started writing for a living. I’ll let Washington Irving provide a fitting epitaph for this useful meaning:
“Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking.”
— Otto E. Mezzo
No. 1 — March 16th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
[...] from the lexicide of verbiage, no other meaning drift is as disturbing as this one. You don’t have to be a first-year Latin [...]
No. 2 — April 6th, 2009 at 4:55 am
[...] Since teachers look for certain key points in essays and papers, students carpet-bomb them with verbiage, hoping they hit the magic words by sheer volume. This habit carries over into the working world, [...]
No. 3 — July 22nd, 2009 at 7:44 am
[...] (or the positive) negative. They call for postmortems on live projects and proudly hail their verbiage. So welcome stagnant to the lexicon of perfectly acceptable business descriptors that in reality [...]
No. 4 — August 10th, 2009 at 10:55 am
[...] will grant that words like verbiage, leverage and differential are misused because folks guess at their meanings and guess wrongly. But [...]
No. 5 — December 16th, 2009 at 9:13 am
[...] study of methods. Those five letters exist for a reason other than to add more syllables to your verbiage and make you (supposedly) sound smarter. If you insist on using big words incorrectly, you need to [...]
No. 6 — March 4th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
[...] two weeks ago, my team conferenced with a client who embraced verbiage. Within his barrage of DVTs, PPORs and USPs (don’t look them up — they are all acronyms [...]
No. 7 — July 6th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
[...] like anyone cares what I think. The impedance in impedance mismatch adds nothing but ignorance and verbiage to your writing. However, because it adds a sort of fluffy pretentiousness, it will win and [...]
No. 8 — July 26th, 2010 at 11:22 am
[...] that’s in just a 30-day period on one major news website. Our appetite for verbiage truly is insatiable. Now, which is worse: repetitious redundancy or using redundancy as a synonym [...]