Some words on wording.

In a ‘Summary of Changes to the Microsoft Services Agreement’ relating to a recent update, to which I was directed by an email from Microsoft of 14th August 2024, one of the specifications is the following:

In the Microsoft Rewards section, we added verbiage to clarify how to claim Points on the Rewards Dashboard and that Points will be awarded for only those Searches used for genuine good-faith personal research purposes. (Anon 2024).

The writers of this document, or those charged with checking whatever automatic system has generated it, seem unaware, or careless of seeming so, of the fact that ‘verbiage’ has since the early eighteenth century usually been employed to mean empty waffle, especially of a pseudo-technical kind, and usually in writing rather than speech. The OED definitions of verbiage seem deliberately to flirt with parody: ‘Superabundant or superfluous wording; profusion of words without good cause, or without helping to make the intended meaning clearer or more precise; excessive wordiness or elaborateness of language.’

Intriguingly, verbiage does have a more respectable history, as an equivalent to ‘wording’, in which sense it is used of documents or treaties, where precision rather than vagueness is being evoked: the Duke of Wellington is adduced remarking of a treaty in a letter of 1804 that ‘the previous verbiage is thought sufficient to bind us’ (Wellington 1834-9: 3.193). In fact verbiage is sometimes qualified in older usages as ‘legal verbiage’, (Shiels 1873, 29) or ‘schoolmen’s verbiage’ (Payne 1940, 68),  so a charitable reading of the Microsoft T&Cs would see it as continuous with this formalistic lineage. Not surprisingly, the mock-philological description of the letter ‘unfilthed’ by a hen from a rubbish dump in chapter 1.5 of Finnegans Wake (which mirrors the chaotic appearance of the text of the Wake itself), evokes the movements of a letter F which ‘stalks all over the page … amid the verbiage’ (Joyce 1975, 111, 121).

One might perhaps have expected the evolution of the word to go in the other direction, with verbiage originally having the Latinate sound of a specialised term of law, which, like many such words, might gradually have acquired the meaning of vacuous superfluity, given that the dinning of precision can often produce obscurity for listeners.  Garbage, referring from the fifteenth century to the offal or unpalatable offscourings of an animal, and an example of the preservation of seventeenth-century usage in US English, may have had an influence here. Though the etymology of that latter word is uncertain, a link with garble has been suggested. Intriguingly, this word undergoes a similar alternation between clarity and confusion to that undergone by verbiage. To garble, entering English via Italian and French from Arabic ġirbāl, a sieve, originally meant to filter or clean items like spices or dyestuffs of impurities. From being employed metaphorically in this sense to refer to the ill-advised or over-finical editing of classical texts, garbling acquired the inverted sense of obscuring or mangling the meaning of some original. Verbiage and garbage are made confederate by proximity in William Drummond’s evocation of a bombastic preacher:

With noise, and start, and wild theatric stare,
With chill conception, sanctimonious cant,
And marrowless verbiage of a yeasty brain,
Dishonouring sacred texts; and for the bread
Of life, dispensing to the hungry flock
Unhallowed garbage. (Drummond 1822, 77)

There is a large family of words which evolve into words used to indicate wordiness by mimicry, in Wallace Stevens’s ‘jovial hullabaloo’ (Stevens 1971, 59). Indeed, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra uses the very word word to imitate inane wordiness in her echolalic ‘He words me girls, he words me’ (Shakespeare 2011, 157). This might be thought to be a zero-degree enactment of verbigerating, or the reverberative action of verbiage. The fortunes of this word may be taken as an example of the auxetic propensity of all language to exorbitate, expanding into inanity even in its attempts at continence.

 

References

Anon (2024). ‘Summary of Changes to the Microsoft Services Agreement.’ Online at https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/servicesagreement/upcoming-updates

Drummond, William Hamilton (1822).  Clontarf, A Poem. Dublin: Archer, Hodges and M’Arthur.

Joyce, James (1975). Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber.

Payne, John Howard (1940). The Last Duel in Spain and Other Plays. Ed. Codman Hislop and W. R. Richardson. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Shakespeare, William (2011). Complete Works. Ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan. London: Arden Shakespeare.

Shiels, Andrew (1873). Rusticating in Reality: A Pierian Paraphrase. Halifax: James Bowes and Sons.

Stevens, Wallace (1971). Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.

Wellington, 1st Duke of (1834-1839). The Dispatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington: During his Various Campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, the Low Countries, and France, from 1799 to 1818. 13 Vols. Ed. John Gurwood. London: John Murray.