Thinking back to an old school essay, year 1 in high school, when I encountered for the first time the word 'verbose'. There it sat in fat red ink, occupying all of its allocated territory in the margin and even overlapping my writing. My first reaction was candid delight. To read someone else's thoughts, and serious thoughts no less, on intellectual property that is finally your own, not the former amalgam of parents, teachers and friends' minds that was all too common in junior high and before, was both a daunting and exciting experience. My classmated had of course all received their graded essays and there was a buzz about the classroom with whispers firing off this way and that, demanding to know scores and averages. Fortunately it did not last long since the bell rang and swept the frenzy aside. The only way to fully savour the experience of somebody else's comments about your work is to be alone and silent. So there I sat in the library scanning the margins, deciphering the squiggles, working through the lines and crosses until 'verbose' came into sight. "Verbose?" I said to myself, "what does that mean?" At that point there was a 50/50 chance of it being an elogy about my person, becacsue let's face it, in high school anything said about what you do is a direct comment on your person. Distance, if at all, creeps in later in life. So there was only one judge who could pronounce a proper verdict on the 'verbose trial' and that was The Pocket Oxford Dictionary. Delight ended on page 1433 of the POD with the following entry: "verbose. adjective using or expressed in more words than are needed." A profound blow to my ego indeed.
Alas, those high school days are long gone, drifting along the long river, under the proverbial bridge, amongst everyone elses' collective flotsam. However the issue of verbosity is still firmly rooted in the present, and with the advent of blogging perhaps it has never been more relative, this particular entry in omnitude being a prime example. I have read thoudsands of snippets on blogs that I knew absoltely nothing about and frankly didn't want to know anything about because the writing was as verbose and mundane as the daily routine I carry out every morning: get up, pee, put kettle on, make toast, check email, eat toast, drink tea, poo, wash, dress and leave. Furthermore, I think I must have read the words 'ramblings' and 'blatherings' well over a hundred times by now...all this leads me to the conlusion that there is a great deal of verbosity going on in blogging. So much so that blogging may well be taught some day, in the classroom of our children's children, as one of mankind's most monumental exercises in verbosity.
Now comes the mini-bomb, so to speak. All of the above presupposes that verbosity is a bad thing, that everything written down should be clear and concise. This tendancy for reducing things to their clearest form extends to other areas of life too, trimming lawns and hedges is one example that comes to mind, urban planning is another. But when you go out, wherever you are, stop and look for a second at what's happening around you: sheer chaos. Chaos seems to have worked for the world until the first human civilization came about, why can't it still work now? Ah we're back at binary choices again, binary fascism, and i detest it with the most bitter scorn. Verbose or not verbose is your choice, I'll let you be the judge of the path I have taken.
