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jackThis 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-21 10:07 pm (UTC)I like leverage, if only because it annoys so many people :-)
Date: 2006-03-22 05:00 pm (UTC)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 :-)
Date: 2006-03-22 06:00 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2006-03-26 05:01 pm (UTC)Re: you/thou
Date: 2006-03-27 07:24 am (UTC)Re: I like leverage, if only because it annoys so many people :-)
Date: 2006-03-28 12:12 am (UTC)* 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 :-)
Date: 2006-03-28 06:54 am (UTC)[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 :-)
Date: 2006-03-28 07:35 am (UTC):) (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 :-)
Date: 2006-03-28 12:12 am (UTC)