Comments on: Persnickitors beware! I praise leverage as a verb

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:32:34 +0000

Is it now possible to usage a word for any purpose?

It just don’t make no sense to me.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:30:42 +0000

“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.

By: Derek Brown

Derek Brown — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:33:40 +0000

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/

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:15:18 +0000

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

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:35:18 +0000

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”.