On leveragement

There are many things that make even the most good-natured pedant wince, but one of the most painful is the use of nouns as verbs. I have just been reading a book on ‘blogging’* that two or three times urges the reader to ‘leverage’ his or her blog. “Leverage your blog for everything imaginable . . .” (Why, incidentally, do all the books on blogging seem to come from the USA, the world's jargon centre ?)

* This word does not make me wince at all: rather do I admire the witty coinage of a new term by shortening the term weblog - in a fashion somewhat like our words ‘bike’ , ‘zoo’ , 'taxi' and 'cab' from ‘bicycle’ , ‘zoological gardens’, 'taximeter' and 'cabriolet' - to describe a new phenomenon. And we must include 'telly' and 'phone' in this list.

One of my heroes - even if time has proved him to be a prophet with less than full honour among his people - is Alan P Herbert, the MP, writer and amateur boat skipper who in the 1930s conducted a newspaper campaign to stifle what he saw as bad use of the English language. Among his pet hates was ‘noun-verbing’ (my term rather than his, I think); usages such as ‘to service’, ‘to condition’, ‘to contact’ and ‘to voice’. He was no doubt right in his own time: but all these are now entrenched in twenty-first century jargon, and it is really too late to shake them off (or rather to disentrench them, if they are indeed disentrenchable, though after such long acceptance they may be past disentrenchment).

But ‘to leverage’ is awful because ‘leverage’ is already a noun made from a verb. How far can we take this noun-verb-noun-verb process ? A lever > to lever > leverage > to leverage > leveragement > to leveragement > leveragementation > leveragementationary > to leveragementationarise > leveragementationarisability . . . ? Ugh.

On leveragement