Verbosity

Verbosity or verboseness is speech or writing that uses more words than necessary, e.g. 'in spite of the fact that' vice 'although'. The opposite of verbosity is plain language. Some teachers, including the author of The Elements of Style, warn against verbosity; similarly Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, et al famously avoid it. Synonyms include wordiness, verbiage, prolixity, grandiloquence, garrulousness, expatiation, logorrhea, and sesquipedalianism.Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,I will be brief.'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.''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.' Verbosity or verboseness is speech or writing that uses more words than necessary, e.g. 'in spite of the fact that' vice 'although'. The opposite of verbosity is plain language. Some teachers, including the author of The Elements of Style, warn against verbosity; similarly Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, et al famously avoid it. Synonyms include wordiness, verbiage, prolixity, grandiloquence, garrulousness, expatiation, logorrhea, and sesquipedalianism. 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 λογόρροια, 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. 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 (not words a foot long). 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 garrīre, '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 expatiātus, past participle from spatiārī, 'to wander'. They refer to enlarging a discourse, text, or description. The word logorrhea 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.