When Did We Start ‘Leveraging’ Everything?
[Update: (11/13/11) It has been brought my attention that the Google trends graph is most certainly skewed due to the television show titled Leverage on TNT. I’m going to leave the post as is because I think my point still stands.]
You know when you say or write a word so many times it begins to sound or look weird? You may even lose the ability to comprehend the word temporarily.
Recently, I’ve been experiencing this phenomena with one word in particular. The problem is, I’m neither writing nor speaking the term.
Through conversations, reading blog posts and most audiovisual wave lengths, I’ve slowly lost my grip on the term ‘leverage.’ According to the trustworthy site Unsuck It, the term is defined as:
Take advantage of, use, or act upon.
While I think a normal use of the term is perfectly fine, the blatant abuse of this now buzzword is simply unacceptable.
It dawned on me that perhaps its use had always had such high frequency, so I did a quick comparison on Google Trends. The results were suprising (kind of).
I chose the synonym ‘utilize’ for comparison. If we’re to believe these data, it would appear that I’m not actually crazy. At some point in late 2008, there was a spike in the frequency of searches for ‘leverage’. Probably something like, “Why is everyone saying ‘leverage’?”
I also found it interesting there is a definite spike found in the latter months of the year. Why? I have no idea, but it is a relief to know I’m not making this up.
In the end, I’m not asking anyone to stop using it, but to perhaps utilize the strengths of a thesaurus. Hell, maybe just use a thesaurus.
With any luck, my confusion around the word will clear up, and it won’t be forever lost from my lexicon.
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