Orotund

Orotund, as it relates to prose, means overblown or pompous language.  Not necessarily verbose, but just flowery or, one of my favorite words, magniloquent.  I came across this word in Jeffery Toobin’s wonderful observation of the Supreme Court, The Nine. Orotund is used to describe the overblown wording of decisions written by Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Verbosity

Dreadfully sorry about the lateness of this post.

I chose verbosity because it is obviously a namsake to this blog.  Not a particularly obscure word, it means the use of more words than necessary. It is, however, a great example of how you can have a literal understanding of a word but entirely miss the semantic one.  The dictionary makes the connotation of verbosity clear: it is a negative phrase.  As a child, however (and well into young adulthood),  I saw it as a compliment.  Someone who was verbose was someone who spoke in great detail with discriptive language to provide the listener with a complete picture.  Where did this mistake come from? When I was young, my favorite form of entertainment was text adventures on the TRS-80.  The most famous of this was, of course Zork.  When you reentered a room, the computer would only repeat the name and mutable information (e.g. whether or not a door is open).  A careful player though needed to reread information over and over again, making sure nothing was missed.  By typing “verbose” you would be given a full description each time you came back to the room.  One of the most important commands in the game, verbose carried only the best of connotations to me.

The original name for this blog was supposed to be eDiction, but the word was already taken.  It is a rather weak word blog that never has not been updated since its original nine entries ending in May, but it is easy to lose a good name to a weak blog when they don’t cost a thing.  Instead, I chose eVerbosity.  The name was free, but after I thought of the title, I did notice that someone else had coined the phrase before.  A google search brought me to a review on Yelp by Jon “Motor Mouth” B.  EVerbosity to him is using more words than necessary online.