Verbosity or verboseness is speech or writing that uses more words than necessary (for example, using "Despite the fact that" instead of "Although"). The opposite of verbosity is plain language. Some teachers, including the author of The Elements of Style, warn writers not to be verbose. Similarly, some authors, including Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, are known for their avoidance of verbosity.
Synonyms for verbosity include wordiness, verbiage, prolixity, grandiloquence, garrulousness, expatiation, logorrhea, and sesquipedalianism. Slang terms such as verbal diarrhea also refer to the practice.
Examples of verbosity are common in political speech, academic prose, and other genres.
Video Verbosity
Etymology and synonyms
The word verbosity comes from Latin verbosus, "wordy". There are many other English words that also refer to the use of excessive words.
Prolixity comes from Latin prolixus, "extended". Prolixity can also be used to refer to the length of a monologue or speech, especially a formal address such as a lawyer's oral argument.
Grandiloquence is complex speech or writing judged to be pompous or bombastic diction. It is a combination of the Latin words grandis ("great") and loqui ("to speak").
Logorrhea or logorrhoea (from Greek ?????????, logorrhoia, "word-flux") is an excessive flow of words. It is often used pejoratively to describe prose that is hard to understand because it is needlessly complicated or uses excessive jargon. The term is also sometimes applied to unnecessarily wordy speech in general.
Sesquipedalianism is a linguistic style that involves the use of long words. Roman poet Horace coined the phrase sesquipedalia verba in his Ars Poetica. It is a compound of sesqui, "one and a half", and pes, "foot", a reference to meter. The earliest recorded usage in English of sesquipedalian is in 1656, and of sesquipedalianism, 1863.
Garrulous comes from Latin garrulus, "talkative", a form of the verb garr?re, "to chatter". The adjective may describe a person who is excessively talkative, especially about trivial matters, or a speech that is excessively wordy or diffuse
The noun expatiation and the verb expatiate come from Latin expati?tus, past participle from spati?r?, "to wander". They refer to enlarging a discourse, text, or description.
Maps Verbosity
Scientific jargon
The word logorrhoea is often used pejoratively to describe highly abstract prose that contains little concrete language. Since abstract writing is hard to visualize, it often seems confusing or excessive. Works in academic fields that involve many abstract ideas, such as philosophy, often fail to include extensive concrete examples of their ideas.
In an attempt to prove that "logorrhoea" accompanies a lack of academic rigor, physics professor Alan Sokal wrote a nonsensical essay, and had it published in a respected journal (Social Text) as a practical joke. The journal defended the article as genuine even after Sokal denounced his own article publicly. The episode has come to be known as the Sokal Affair.
The term is sometimes also applied to unnecessarily wordy speech in general; this is more usually referred to as prolixity. Some people defend the use of additional words as idiomatic, a matter of artistic preference, or helpful in explaining complex ideas or messages.
Examples
Warren G. Harding, the 29th President of the United States, was notably verbose even in his era. A Democratic leader, William Gibbs McAdoo, described Harding's speeches as "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea."
Senator Robert C. Byrd (Democrat, of West Virginia) lost his position as Majority Leader in 1989 because his colleagues felt his speeches, which often employed obscure allusions to ancient Rome and Greece, were not an asset to the party base.
The Michigan Law Review published a 229-page parody of postmodern writing titled "Pomobabble: Postmodern Newspeak and Constitutional 'Meaning' for the Uninitiated". The article consists of complicated and context-sensitive self-referencing narratives. The text is peppered with number of parenthetical citations and asides, which is supposed to mock the cluttered style of postmodern writing.
In The King's English, Fowler gives a passage from The Times as an example of verbosity: "The Emperor received yesterday and to-day General Baron von Beck.... It may therefore be assumed with some confidence that the terms of a feasible solution are maturing themselves in His Majesty's mind and may form the basis of further negotiations with Hungarian party leaders when the Monarch goes again to Budapest." Fowler objected to this passage because The Emperor, His Majesty, and the Monarch all refer to the same person: "the effect", he pointed out in Modern English Usage, "is to set readers wondering what the significance of the change is, only to conclude that there is none."
Style advice
While verbosity may be rhetorically useful verbose parts in communications are sometimes referred to as "fluff" or "fuzz".
The ancient Greek philosopher Callimachus is quoted as saying "Big book, big evil" (???? ??????? ???? ?????, mega biblion, mega kakon), rejecting the epic style of poetry in favor of his own.
William Strunk, an American professor of English advised in 1918 to "Use the active voice: Put statements in positive form; Omit needless words."
In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) Henry Watson Fowler says, "It is the second-rate writers, those intent rather on expressing themselves prettily than on conveying their meaning clearly, & still more those whose notions of style are based on a few misleading rules of thumb, that are chiefly open to the allurements of elegant variation," Fowler's term for the over-use of synonyms. Contrary to Fowler's criticism of several words being used to name the same thing in English prose, in some other languages, including French, it might be thought to be a good writing style.
Mark Twain (1835-1910) wrote "generally, the fewer the words that fully communicate or evoke the intended ideas and feelings, the more effective the communication."
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), the 1954 Nobel laureate for literature, defended his concise style against a charge by William Faulkner that he "had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary." Hemingway responded by saying, "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."
An inquiry into the 2005 London bombings found that verbosity can be dangerous if used by emergency services. It can lead to delay that could cost lives.
A 2005 study from the psychology department of Princeton University found that using long and obscure words does not make people seem more intelligent. Dr. Daniel M. Oppenheimer did research which showed that students rated short, concise texts as being written by the most intelligent authors. But those who used long words or complex font types were seen as less intelligent.
In William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, one of Polonius's many sententious maxims reads
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief.
However, despite this line becoming proverbial over time, Shakespeare's audiences were not necessarily inclined to read Polonius as someone who is perfectly wise; his sentences, like that of much early modern drama, can easily be seen as part of a comic trope.
George Orwell mocked logorrhoea in "Politics and the English Language" (1946) by taking verse (9:11) from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible
"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
and rewriting it as
"Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
Orwell deliberately writes verbosely to mock it as a practice. Both messages could be paraphrased (albeit obtusely) in three words: "Success is stochastic".
Quantum physicist Richard Feynman has also spoken out against verbosity in scientific writing.
See also
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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