Leverage this!
I sat through a presentation at a meeting last week in which the speaker, a really smart guy with an advanced engineering degree, kept using the word "leverage" as a verb. And I don't mean just in its normal-but-flaccid sense, but as a stand-in for just about every verb you can think of. He was making the case for an open source software project or at least standards which we could "leverage" (okay, I kind-of-see where that is going), but at one point he was saying just the opposite: "Companies are leveraging their own software because they can't find what they want though they would gladly use something else." How can you obtain the advantage of a lever from something which a lever would work against?
I mean, I thought "signage" was bad, but Chuy[1], this is getting out of control. My other language pet peeve is "preventative maintenance": it is not maintenance undertaken for the purpose of preventation, is it? No, it's undertaken for prevention. We are not trying to preventate anything.
Leverage is a thing, not an action. If you want to move something, you use a lever. When you have mechanical advantage, that state is called leverage. You do not leverage a boulder with a stick, yet that is exactly the way it was sometimes used in its quasi-understandable phase. I think the verb is actually, "to lever", though "to move" or "to heave" seem much less awkward. Nowadays, leverage simply means "to use". Why not just use, "use"?
I'm not the only person having this conniption/observation.
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[1] In Mexican-American culture, Chuy is the preferred nickname for men named Jesus, as in, "Que haria Chuy?" [2]
[2] Apologies to Mr. White, my 7th grade Spanish teacher. Clearly, there should be an accent over the "e" in Que and the "i" in haria, but I fear it would not display well in all browsers [3].
[3] Mr. White, through no fault of his own, did not anticipate these problems, otherwise I would still retain that information, too.
I mean, I thought "signage" was bad, but Chuy[1], this is getting out of control. My other language pet peeve is "preventative maintenance": it is not maintenance undertaken for the purpose of preventation, is it? No, it's undertaken for prevention. We are not trying to preventate anything.
Leverage is a thing, not an action. If you want to move something, you use a lever. When you have mechanical advantage, that state is called leverage. You do not leverage a boulder with a stick, yet that is exactly the way it was sometimes used in its quasi-understandable phase. I think the verb is actually, "to lever", though "to move" or "to heave" seem much less awkward. Nowadays, leverage simply means "to use". Why not just use, "use"?
I'm not the only person having this conniption/observation.
---------------
[1] In Mexican-American culture, Chuy is the preferred nickname for men named Jesus, as in, "Que haria Chuy?" [2]
[2] Apologies to Mr. White, my 7th grade Spanish teacher. Clearly, there should be an accent over the "e" in Que and the "i" in haria, but I fear it would not display well in all browsers [3].
[3] Mr. White, through no fault of his own, did not anticipate these problems, otherwise I would still retain that information, too.
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