06.18.08
Persnickitors beware! I praise leverage as a verb
By day I am a writer and editor for a publication that covers marketing (by night, I am The Incredible Sulk!, but that’s another story). Not too far into my tenure in this position (editor, not Sulk—OK, Sulk, too), I found myself facing a potential arch-enemy in the form of the word leverage. This word glared at me from a manuscript. Actively glared, as it was performing as a verb. The sentence in question was something on the order of “Many marketers leverage customer testimonials to spread positive word-of-mouth.”
I fretted a bit. Leverage exhibits all the symptoms of the sort of word-ballooning I decry in my book Write Tight. The word lever is a perfectly good noun; so is leverage. Why verbicize (”verbate”?) leverage when the verb lever is available? In the manuscript, I replaced the verb. At least, I attempted to. Consider my edits in search of synonym:
- Many marketers exploit customer testimonials . . . Hmm, too harsh. Sounds manipulative.
- Many marketers utilize customer testimonials . . . Close, but utilize with its implication of invention lacks the sense of taking advantage of an appropriate asset. OK, then how about:
- Many marketers take advantage of customer testimonials . . . Closer, maybe, but it still has the tinge of manipulation.
- Many marketers use customer testimonials . . . No. Use is a weak substitute.
- Many marketers lever customer testimonials . . . No. And no. Didn’t even consider it. When was the last time you heard any human being use lever as a verb?
I let leverage live within the manuscript, and I contend that it should live in the language, because it fills a need. Granted, some hate the word, in part because it began as jargon—financial jargon and not computer jargon as one source has claimed, with its first recorded use in the late ’30s.
All this comes to mind because leverage appeared in a recent BBC list of listener-contributed nominations of “50 office-speak phrases you love to hate” (I’d be tempted to ask why “office-speak” isn’t on the list, but I think I just have). The BBC list presents a shiver-inducing group of truly atrocious words and phrases. For instance, what the hell is an “idea shower”? And here’s one I haven’t encountered before: “The new one which has got my goat is conversate.” Yikes. You can converse, so why do you need to conversate?
And I hear some of you saying, “Mr. Incredible Sulk, you blast conversate when converse is available, yet you defend leverage when lever is available?” I do indeed. Conversate fills no need. It is duplicative, a bizarre “synonym” of converse. On the other hand, leverage is not a precise synonym of lever, neither in noun nor in verb form. It fills a need.
And, what the hell, let’s look at some history. The noun lever has been used since at least the late 1200s; the noun leverage has been used in the literal since at least the early 1700s, and figuratively since at least the early 1800s. The verb use of each? The Oxford English Dictionary presents the following quote as the earliest recorded use of lever as a verb meaning “to lift or raise”: “The bottom of the pole being ‘levered’ out of the ground.” This is in 1876, and the use is so unusual that the author put the word in quotes. What’s more, this is physical lifting; the figurative sense isn’t recorded until 14 years later. Therefore . . .
Noun-to-verb transformation time, test subject lever: around 400-500 years.
Noun-to-verb transformation time, test subject leverage: around 50 years. The upstart!
Me, I think that employing the word leverage to create unique meaning is a marvelous example of leveraging the flexibility of English.
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and 
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Jennifer said,
June 19, 2008 at 11:35 pm
I have to agree with you on the “leverage” usage here. There’s really no better way to express the meaning without a whole lot of extra words, though I will say I’m generally opposed to the noun-as-verb usage. I always called this “verbing” as opposed to your “verbicizing”, but definitely the same idea. Taking a fine noun and verbing it up, as opposed to using the actual verb that already exists (and is generally a shorter word), is something apparently contagious in executive and administrative circles.
I’ve heard conversate before and cringed. A related atrocity – orientate. This one appears in dictionaries now, and it makes me sad. Orient is perfectly fine as a verb, and I even like it phonetically with all its vowels. Football announcers always talk about how “that play is very hard to defense,” and I yell “defend” at them every time. Individuals are noted for having “gifted” millions of dollars to a university. Grrrrr. One more – I’m not sure this is really even incorrect, but it bugs me to no end – using the verb “grow” the way politicians do, e.g., “We need to grow the economy…” I don’t know about you, but I’d rather expand the economy or help the economy to grow, but the economy isn’t corn. We don’t grow it. For some reason, it sounds like a transitive/intransitive error, though clearly grow can go either way. It seems along the lines of saying “we need to learn our children”.
Phil said,
November 28, 2008 at 6:15 am
It is not difficult. The correct ‘leveraging’ of the English language would surely be:
Many marketers use customer testimonials as leverage…
Now stop wastaging my time
Derek Brown said,
January 21, 2009 at 10:33 am
Customer testimonials are a tool. Some tools are indeed levers, but not all, and my feeling is that testimonials fall into the “not” category.
“Leverage” lends itself very easily to freedom from content; see, in that respect:
http://leveragethis.wordpress.com/2007/09/12/leverage-is-not-a-verb/
Alex said,
January 30, 2009 at 2:30 pm
“Many marketers use customer testimonials. No. Use is a weak substitute”
No. This is perfectly fine, it’s direct and descriptive without making it sound like more than it is.
For example, many marketers leverage sesquipedalian verbiage to convey grandiose significance and lend a greater feeling of gravitas to their mission statements.
What they acheive by this, is a failure to communicate effectively and a loss of engagement with the reader. Leverage should be taken round the back and shot, innit.
Mark said,
March 10, 2009 at 11:32 am
Is it now possible to usage a word for any purpose?
It just don’t make no sense to me.