09.25.08
Maybe saying what you mean in the first place might help
Sometimes it’s best to say what you mean when claiming that someone didn’t mean what he said. Reacting to criticism of John McCain’s recent assertion that the fundamentals of our economy are strong, Sarah Palin told Fox “News”:
It was an unfair attack on the verbiage that Sen. McCain chose to use because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our work force, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course, that is strong and that is the foundation of our economy.
Palin used the word verbiage to mean “wording” or “phrasing,” and dictionaries do allow that such meanings might apply. But the first meaning, and very much a prevalent and powerful meaning, of verbiage is (and I’ll leave it to the apolitical—I think—Oxford English Dictionary: “Wording of a superabundant or superfluous character, abundance of words without necessity or without much meaning; excessive wordiness.” Myself, I remember the meaning by pretending that verbiage is a contraction of “verbal garbage.”
So, is it unfair for me to attack Palin’s easily misinterpreted use of verbiage (just because that’s what the word usually means)? If so, consider me unfair. One would think that people in the public eye might give a bit more concentration on carefully choosing their verbiage when defending another’s verbiage.
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WIIIAI said,
September 29, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Actually, Fox chose to tidy up Palin’s language in the transcript. What she actually said (I watched the interview; how I suffer for my blogging) was “verbage,” whose definition is harder to find in the OED because it’s not actually a real word.