Leverage

[jack]

This words irks most people I know. Indeed, everyone will know that the title means I'm going to talk about the *word "leverage", instead of thinking I might have leverage on something.

First we had 'lever', a verb and noun. And then 'leverage', refering the the act of levering. And then 'leverage', the verb. When you have leverage, you're magnifying the effect of something, when used literally, your strength becoming more strength (at a cost of distance) to move something.

But it occurs to me, I think the verbs are always used

* To lever something you want to move
* To leverage something you have

Isn't it so? I lever this door open. I leverage my minute-but-real trade advantage.

So the new verb *does* have a niche outside of finance. Of course, *most* of the time it's used when 'use' would be just as well, since there isn't a clear trade off, you just mean "use most effectively", but in theory, it should have a specific meaning not covered by any other word.

Comments

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

You missed a perfectly good opportunity to use the words "synergy" and "utilise" there!

Of course, when I say "perfectly good", I mean "inasmuch as there is ever an excuse to use them, which should be approximately never"

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

"Synergy" Two things that are both increased by working together. Of course, again, it's mostly used to mean "use". In fact, management concepts seem entirely geared around "use", that no doubt has some bearing on how many people feel they're treated :)

"Utilise" I admit, a justification for this escapes me. It *could* be used to mean "use, as intended" as opposed to just "use", but that's a pretty fine distinction. I can't think of any example where it couldn't usefully be replaced by 'use'. Or sometimes by nothing.

[angoel.livejournal.com]

'Utilise' is different from 'use', in that 'utilise' largely means 'use', but also carries the implication that what you are using is something that only you, or a few other people have.

In this way it is similar to 'leverage', but where 'leverage' largely deals with intangible items (ie trade advantage, expertise, etc), 'utilise' deals with more tangible items.

Therefore, when you say 'We're going to utilise our high speed cars' rather than 'We're going to use our high speed cars', it is clear to the person that you're talking to that you believe that your high speed cars are a unique selling point, and that their uniqueness is exploitable.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

The people who use these words in all seriousness are members of a subculture, just like goths, chavs, geeks, trainspotters, etc. So they have their own dialect, for to exclude outsiders.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I think people who make up these words have a horror of the word "use" which would do perfectly well instead. I suppose using a word that had only three letters and one syllable might imply that any idiot could work in marketing and management consultancy, whereas really it's only a job for a select few idiots.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, people who are competant in a field of necessity have a jargon. Then people with a jargon seem more competant, because we've internalised that correlation.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but I've never met a competent person who uses the words "utilise", "leverage" and "synergy", except biologists referring to synergistic processes. Even physicists don't in my experience say "we need to apply some leverage" or "we need to calculate the leverage"; they say "we need to use a lever" or "we need to calculate the force applied by the lever".

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

That is, I was suggesting that making up *any* jargon can make you seem competant, not just using an existing jargon. In fact, making one up is better because no-one can disagree with what it means :)

OTOH, everyone ends up using management jargon when they deal with other people who do, and many of them are competant.

PS. And I think in *finance* 'leverage' is as technical as 'synergy' is in biology, so that's another exception, but not what we're talking about here.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Ohhh I see what you meant now. Yes.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Darned silly verb. I just use things.

Oh, I forgot the other day, so...

*long-distance nnnynngs your fuzzy top*

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

My top? As in my head, not my garment?

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Yes... the top of your head. :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah, you remembered. Yes, it's just getting nice now. *is nnnynnged*

[angoel.livejournal.com]

'Leverage' is different from 'use', in that 'leverage' largely means 'use', but also carries the implication that what you are using is something that only you, or a few other people have.

Therefore, when you say 'We're going to leverage our expertise in realtime multimedia' rather than 'We're going to use our expertise in realtime multimedia', it is clear to the person that you're talking to that you believe this is a relatively unique selling point, and that it's uniqueness is exploitable.

This implication also allows 'leverage' to be applied to areas where 'use' cannot be. For example 'We need to get some leverage on Mr Black to close this deal', referring to blackmail material. But that's a whole different story.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. That is true, isn't it. OK, chalk up another justification!

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Indeed, leverage (verb) has connotations more similar to exploit than use to me. Mr Black is experiencing leverage (noun) there so I don't think it's quite the same discussion anyway...

[ewx.livejournal.com]

...but I don't think you can leverage everything you can exploit. You can exploit or leverage an advantage but you can only exploit a person.

[angoel.livejournal.com]

Yes - I agree that exploit is close.

Exploit, however, carries implications that you are somehow using up the item that you are exploiting, which leverage does not. Compare 'We're going to leveage our first class workforce' with 'We're going to exploit our first class workforce'.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I have the using-up implication of exploit. I think I could exploit the position of my castle at the top of a hill to dominate the surrounding lands, for instance.

[chess]

'exploit' does have negative connotations, though.

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose that I've heard a lot of sentences that include both "leverage" and "monopoly".

I suppose that there's a force-multiplying effect involved with this: rather than just using your monopoly advantage to put your prices up on the thing that you have a monopoly on, you multiply it by bringing your monopoly advantage into fields where you don't have a pre-existing monopoly. And as with other forms of leverage, there's a downside (Mechanical: high force, low speed / high speed, low force, Financial: (e.g. buying shares on margin) high potential profit, high risk): a greater risk that people will get pissed off, and that what you are doing will be found to be illegal.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

I like leverage, if only because it annoys so many people :-) I don't care if it has a distinct experiential meaning from all other words; natural languages do other things besides conveying experiential meaning in maximally efficient ways.

I like leverage, if only because it annoys so many people :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Indeed, that's a wondrous temptation :) I know when people object splitting infinitives (I'm a bit vague on *why*) and know I specifically disagree -- so if I want to focus on something else I'll avoid it, but otherwise I might take positive delight in doing so.

natural languages do other things besides conveying experiential meaning in maximally efficient ways.

True; some new words I like for no reason. But generally I find it unpleasant when a completely gratuitous word is coined[1]. If 'utilise' sounded better than 'use', or was shorter, it would have a case, but since I don't find it so, I'll probably only like it if it's useful.

[1] Probably because doing so has a tendancy to erode existing distictions. Some, like less/fewer don't really matter but I like them. Some, like lend/borrow, seem kind of essential.

Re: I like leverage, if only because it annoys so many people :-)

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

...tendancy to erode existing distictions. Some, like less/fewer don't really matter but I like them. Some, like lend/borrow, seem kind of essential.

But language history is pretty much nothing but the erosion of existing distinctions and the creation of new ones! You'd have thought that being able to formally distinguish between addressing a single person and more than one person would be quite useful, no? (Nearly all languages I've collected data for - more than 100, from different times, places and families - make this distinction.) Yet most varieties of English happily did away with thou (which allowed one to make further distinctions, in addition to number) several centuries ago. We seem to manage :-) And I think speakers of English varieties which don't distinguish between lend and borrow manage perfectly well too.

Besides, if a particular distinction which really does turn out to be important for practical communication gets eroded, a compensatory change will typically occur which replaces it, via a different linguistic form (e.g. subject vs. object distinctions in non-pronouns being realised by tighter word order, after the inflectional marking of the distinction was lost between Old and Middle English; some modern English varieties creating forms like youse and y'all to compensate for the lost distinction above).

In fact, a good argument for preferring "gratuitous" longer words over "simpler" short words with the same meaning is that they actually help us to retain phonological distinctions between words! Most sound changes tend to be destructive: they eliminate weak sounds or unstressed syllables, simplify consonant clusters and diphthongs, lenite intervocalic consonants, and generally tend to make words shorter and less distinctive. Very few sound changes actually add sounds to words, or strengthen existing sounds. If sound change was the only historical process affecting the form of words, we would be in a bad way, with all words tending towards zero length! But happily, other types of change maintain the average length of words e.g. borrowing from other languages with a longer word for that meaning, coining new vocabulary, forming compound words, and of course, using the derivational morphology of the language to lengthen existing words.

A nice example is French oreille, an ear. It derives from Latin auricula, the diminutive formed on auris (default word for an ear). If early Romance speakers had carried on using the short and simple word for an ear, auris, the radical sound changes which affected French would have left the modern language with a very short and indistinct form something like *or (homophonous with the word for "gold"). Their preference for the longer auricula (which came to lose its diminutive meaning) unwittingly enabled them to give the modern language a much more distinctive word for this meaning.

So I could argue in favour of utilise over use on such a basis :-) Not that justifications are necessary or particularly relevant; people largely speak without consciously justifying every lexical, phonetic and and grammatical choice they make (hundreds in every utterance), and thus the language changes as a whole anyway.

you/thou

[fanf]

And then some people brought back the distinction with "y'all".

Re: you/thou

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Er, yes - I said this in my second paragraph!

Re: I like leverage, if only because it annoys so many people :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. What you say seems convincing, and yet I seem unable to *like* it. Trying to analyse the underlying reasons for that:

* Making new useful words. No problem, I like that.
* Losing useless words. No problem, people don't have to say them if they don't want to. If I do, I will, and they'll probably understand :)
* Creating new words similar to old words. Even a slight shade of meaning *can* be useful -- think of english as a space of concepts with nodes at the words, where we normally choose the best, and it has a penumbra about it of meanings it could apply to, and gaps with no good word are filled in by imprecise description or synonyms ('no, "love" in blah and foo!'); then shades let us be more precise by choosing the right one, and if people don't notice we've only lost a bit, or by using several shades to triangulate even more precisely.
* But there are reasons I don't easily accept:
* Complete (generally longer) synonyms of existing words annoy me. Probably because it seems sloppy and I like well-defined and optimised things, and thinking there *is* a correct answer of some sort. I have no justification for this preference.
* New formations often depend on misconceptions, such as confusing singular/plural. Sometimes I don't mind, but often it riles me just because it seems to be accepting ignorance, and I (to misquote Speaker for the Dead) have an almost pathological reliance on the idea that the more people know the better. There's some truth here, but a lot of preference.
* Relating to the last-point-but-one, I (and many people I love) love playing with language, using exactly the correct word, and making up new ones in what seem to me good ways, and shoe-horning new (even useful) words interferes. Just us.
* Random annoyance at people who and I have difficulty communicating[1]. I remember extremely frusting someone who wanted to "lend" something of mine, genuinely not understanding.
* Subculture. People I know and like tend somewhat to be more pedantic about it, and people I don't less.
* Conservatism. We have a working langauge. It changes naturally, but there's no reason that should make it better, so I resist. A little objective sense here, maybe. But rather futile.

OK, that was cathartic. But as yet almost all preference, no good reasons.

[1] Did that sentence make sense? :)

Re: I like leverage, if only because it annoys so many people :-)

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Random annoyance at people who and I have difficulty communicating[1].
[1] Did that sentence make sense? :)

After a couple of passes :-)

OK, that was cathartic. But as yet almost all preference, no good reasons.

That's OK - people not liking language change is a feature of most languages throughout history too, AFAICT!

Re: I like leverage, if only because it annoys so many people :-)

[(Anonymous)]

After a couple of passes :-)

:) (I wanted to make it symetrical, not "with whom" or "who with me", to not imply the fault was mine or theirs.)

That's OK - people not liking language change is a feature of most languages throughout history too, AFAICT!

Oh my God, I'm the French! :)

Re: I like leverage, if only because it annoys so many people :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I should probably work that up into a post, too :)