Let me make two things clear. Firstly, language is organic. It grows and changes. Words pass out of usage, or take on new meanings. New words are invented for new objects and concepts. People who want language to remain as it is, frozen at the point that they did their English degrees, are probably afraid of change or have large rods inserted in particular orifices.
Secondly, language is important. It is important because it is our main tool for communication. Not only to understand, love and conspire with each other but even to be able to think in the first place. It is very, very difficult to think something for which you do not have the words. Our abilities to think and to relate are bound to our grasp of language – and the integrity of the language that is available to us.
So it’s worth keeping an eye on our words.
Why can leverage not be a verb?
Leverage is the advantage gained by the use of a lever. Imagine a big rock. You ram a crowbar underneath it, push down on the bar and the rock begins to rise. You now have leverage.
The word comes by adding the suffix -age to the verb lever. When you lever (verb) the rock, you get this:
lever + -age = leverage
We are used to this in language:
spill + -age = spillage
dote + -age = dotage
advance + -age = advantage
The suffix –age transforms these verbs into nouns. That’s what it is used for. You advance (verb) your army, to give yourself an advantage (noun).
So if you want to use further the advantage that you have gained, how do you do it? Let me tell you how you don’t do it. You don’t advantage your troops. That’s nonsensical. Because a verb transformed into a noun by adding –age can’t suddenly be a verb as well.
It sounds completely wrong.
And yet bloggers, especially those who would like to be Seth Godin, are doing this all the time.
They say that the way to capitalise on your position – is by leveraging it. In other words, to leverage (verb) your leverage (noun).
It is a crude bastardisation of language. It takes a verb, to lever, that has become a noun, leverage, and twists the word into another verb even though it ends with the noun-defining ending –age. The suffix –age is the linguistic equivalent of streaking across the live final of The X Factor wearing nothing but a banner proclaiming ‘I AM A NOUN’. You can’t get more noun-like than a word made into a noun by the suffix –age.
You can’t spillage me across the floor or dotage me into delirium for suggesting that language does not work this way.
Because if leverage was a verb then we could create leveragage by doing it. And that’s just getting silly.
What do people mean by ‘to leverage’?
In most cases, I think people mean one of two things:
1. They just mean ‘to lever’
‘if you leverage the content that you have already created, you will be able to squeeze out a bit more mileage’
If the writer (it would be unfair to identify him as so many people do it) means capitalising upon the work that you have already done, then the correct word is simply lever:
‘if you lever the content that you have already created…’
And if this sounds dumb, it is because it is. Leverage has become a buzzword, yet there are few situations where it is apt. A much better analogy for capitalising upon previous advantage gained would be advancing your troops further, or investing in new ventures having worked hard to create money in the first place, to name but two.
2. They mean ‘using the leverage you already have to your advantage’
This is how Seth Godin often uses it. I wonder how he can be so convinced that spelling is important yet throw away basic grammar without remorse. He even quotes someone else on his blog:
‘The more you say leverage, the less you’ve probably thought about what you’re saying.’
It’s not just that it stomps all over obvious grammatical integrity. Using leverage as a verb is also confusing, because it means levering your leverage. That is not a simple concept to me.
A confession to finish
Let me confess that there is a recorded use of leverage as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary. In finance, leveraging is using borrowed capital to make investments that will provide greater profit than the interest owed. Maybe that’s where some people derive it from.
I hope that the reasons not to emulate the financial world are evident without having to spell them out, particularly when it comes to language. Do we want to shape the world for the better with our ideas, or shut it out?
The writers who imposed the greatest number of new words upon the English language had the greatest grasp of existing words. When you can write like Shakespeare, by all means make up whatever words you like.
Until then, look after the words you’ve inherited. You might need them for something important one day.
Do you use leverage as a verb? Why? What do you mean by it? What metaphors could we use instead? Do you think this might be a British/US English thing?
Gabriel, I diligently avoid it, if only because “leverage” (v.) has truly earned its status in my privately maintained dead pool of overused and abused words.
Which, as I see it, is the best road to hoe whenever it comes to words we despise, on whatever grounds. Every problem is a communication problem, and policing your personal usage–for jargon, for concision, for whatever shape your own grammatical bugbears take–can only help you. It’s good hygiene. And Orwell would approve.
So. Thank you for, ah, incentivizing me.
Oh, and the contrarian take on all this is well documented: that language is a river and none moreso than the English tongue, and so we should not hold so tightly to fixed meanings and usage. This happens most notoriously with capitalization (Web to web–check how this is sliding) and compounding of previously hyphenated words. And, living languages seem so much more fun than dead ones.
There was a terrific screed on a similar subject, camel case, in the NY Times recently: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/magazine/29FOB-onlanguage-t.html
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually used the word leverage before but I don’t particularly share your frustration at its misuse.
I think I’ve always assumed that when people are using it as a verb they probably mean ‘to apply leverage to’. Is that valid usage? Does it just mean ‘to lever’?
Anyway, dropping the ‘apply’ is something we do with a number of similar concepts (e.g. force, pressure) so it doesn’t really seem too daft a jump to do the same for leverage.
Surely there are hundreds of examples in the English language of phrases that don’t make grammatical sense according to the existing rules at the time, but after a while they’ve been accepted as standard English? (Just looking out the window now it’s raining rain. Shouldn’t it be raining rainage?)
Going off-topic slightly, your example at the end of Shakespeare I think is an interesting sociolinguistic one. I would hypothesise that it’s only in highly literate cultures that a small number of well respected individuals have a highly disproportionate affect on how a language changes (or doesn’t – normally the people are respected precisely because they don’t change the language, although I guess Shakespeare is an exception).
In pre-literate, and I would guess maybe our increasingly post-literate, cultures language changes very quickly as there is no widely accepted or accessible standard of what is and isn’t correct. As our culture becomes increasingly post-literate and post-modern I wonder if we’ll see English start to change more rapidly…?
Yes, the verb to leverage sounds really stupid.
The noun leverage became a business buzz-word when it referred to the magnification factor by which a shift in sales results in a profit shift in the same direction.
Leverage, more simply stated, is business risk. Leveraged companies are risky because a small drop in sales causes a large drop in profit — but a small rise in sales still causes a large rise in profit.
A company’s leverage is under the control of its owner’s, and it can be increased by borrowing money.
People who sell company stock would obviously want leverage to sound like a cool word. As in, “It’s risky, cool! I want to buy it!”.
Personally, I would keep my money as far as I could from anybody who wanted to “leverage” it.
Jeffrey – the private dead pool is wise. But sometimes I can’t help fishing something out to show people how much it stinks… And of course language should shift and change. New words earn their usage by overcoming friction, and it’s important that people who know how language works and evolves provide some of that resistance.
James – the difference is that the verb + -age form is such a big fat noun that it’s ugly to pretend it’s a verb.
Mark – the challenge to post-literate culture (interesting!) is how to use and enjoy language without losing our ability to understand one another.
Corwin – me too!
Though you mention ‘advantage’ as not being possible as a verb, sadly, I have frequently encountered ‘disadvantage’ used as a verb. This is just as maddening. It may be why my area of business seems to have happily latched on to ‘leverage’.
I am out of date on this post, I know. But I am firmly on the side of language being organic and riverlike. I do not believe that any linguistic form is inherently ugly.
I agree with the idea that language’s purpose is to communicate: but I object to having any governors of meaningful usage. Even ugly forms of language (and local government has no shortage: http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/aio/9424111) gain currency by establishing themselves within a social group and convey something within that group, whether it be membership, caution, effectiveness, determination or whatever.
Humans are inherently creative, effective linguists. Some are more sophisticated than others: but language is demotic and does not belong to the elite. Split infinitives, misused apostrophes, malapropisms and novel verbings are ongoing indications (not to mention computerisms like ‘pwn’ and txtspk) of this fact.
Prescriptive linguists are destined to be Canutes, and reduce language in the process. Besides, if everyone spoke in rhyming couplets then it would be harder to make a mark as a good writer.
>Mark – the challenge to post-literate culture (interesting!) is how to use and enjoy language without losing our ability to understand one another.
Why is this the challenge? Isn’t the enjoyment of language increased by a little mutual incomprehensibility? (In any case, a pre/post-literate environment usually requires words that gesture vaguely at concepts rather than encircle them precisely – like ‘leverage’).
‘Language: use and enjoy responsibly’ – no! I want linguistic absinthe-benders! If some experiences are more like a blast of ammonia, so be it.
Andrew – I love your take on this. Language will grow organically whether we like it or not, and there will be many delightful/explosive new forms and new ways of thinking, as well as crude and annoying (to some) usages (I have to admit a fondness for computerisms).
What I’m curious about is whether – to make the organic metaphor a vegetable one – the growth is better cultivated and trained, or left wild. Pruning brings better results of one kind, for example.
I’m not suggesting language should be governed, but if someone thinks that a tree will be healthier if its branches are cut back – then they should say so.
Then you can have conversations about what is healthy – for communication, for enjoyment, for growth.
Mostly, though, I just hate the word leverage.
Hmm, interesting idea about pruning. While it makes the point you’re trying to get across very well, to my mind it’s the wrong analogy. I think there is too much energy in global usage of English to liken it to a plant: it is more like a race, or a free market, or else neologisms are like weeds through gaps in concrete.
So there will be words at the front of the race that you don’t like, just as some weeds are (secretly) an improvement and others are just a blight. But they are voted there by forces much more powerful and much less sophisticated than any constant gardeners.
That only means they’re not stoppable by individual efforts, as I’m sure you understand anyway! That doesn’t undermine the validity of your response to leverage – I think aesthetically I see words as products of usage and tend therefore to see shoddy craftmanship as a welcome signal that people are feeling free to have a go. While trying hard to release only the finest products myself.
Two observation-paragraphs:
I was struck on my gap year by the question ‘where have you come from’ which asks not about your country of origin but about your most recent activity. Similarly by stories that Esperanto failed in part because speakers in different countries soon developed mutually unintelligible local variants and styles. Also, I will probably never be able to call someone ‘bruv’ in earnest.
I love that twitter is a community of linguistic communities, and I love the concept ‘meme’. To me that is a novel social and linguistic concept made possible by new technology and representing the new speed and adaptation of interlinked linguistic conventions. It makes language even more obviously a game where the rules help you play, not a test where the rules mark you down. Like in the invention of rugby, breaking them sometimes lets you have more fun.
On the one hand you say that it’s natural and OK for language to evolve and then claim that it’s wrong when it does ?
Hi Simon. It’s more that I accept that language evolves while thinking that we should exercise some responsibility in shaping its evolution.