New word of the day: Cleverage
It's a verb, of course, as well as a noun. Cleverage is a combination of "clever" and "leverage," and means to ensure the accomplishment of a small feat by an overabundance of small intelligence.
There is some background to this.
I saw a very good definition of "leverage" recently, which I had taken previously to be a synonym of the verb "use." A brokerage house information page defined the term to incorporate a power differential aspect.
To leverage something, or to use leverage, means to bring an extraordinary amount of some resource to bear in order to ensure the success of a task or a transaction. For example, raising a large amount of capital beyond one's ordinary means in order to buy a company is a leveraged buyout.
Where I had thought the once-dubious verb use of the term was appropriately something like "I am leveraging a paper towel to wipe up this spill," the finance-based definition of the term brought back the original sense of a physical mechanism that makes the term meaningful far beyond the "usage" sense, just as using a long pole to lift a heavy rock is leverage. The power of metaphor returned.
Or, going back to my own first experience of hearing "leverage" as a verb, using Visual Studio to write 25 lines of VBScript is an example of "leveraging Microsoft technologies".
It's a verb, of course, as well as a noun. Cleverage is a combination of "clever" and "leverage," and means to ensure the accomplishment of a small feat by an overabundance of small intelligence.
There is some background to this.
I saw a very good definition of "leverage" recently, which I had taken previously to be a synonym of the verb "use." A brokerage house information page defined the term to incorporate a power differential aspect.
To leverage something, or to use leverage, means to bring an extraordinary amount of some resource to bear in order to ensure the success of a task or a transaction. For example, raising a large amount of capital beyond one's ordinary means in order to buy a company is a leveraged buyout.
Where I had thought the once-dubious verb use of the term was appropriately something like "I am leveraging a paper towel to wipe up this spill," the finance-based definition of the term brought back the original sense of a physical mechanism that makes the term meaningful far beyond the "usage" sense, just as using a long pole to lift a heavy rock is leverage. The power of metaphor returned.
Or, going back to my own first experience of hearing "leverage" as a verb, using Visual Studio to write 25 lines of VBScript is an example of "leveraging Microsoft technologies".
posted by rich solomon at 4:37 AM
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