Noun or Verb

Whilst going back in time, (and my RSS reader's history) I come across the story of Bill Gate's spam problems. He gets four Million spam emails a day, and since I thought that interesting the first time I read it, I was still interested in reading about it from another news source, to get a different perspective. This leads me to a slashdot post about the issue, and in the middle of the conversation thread comes a comment on the usage of the work leverage.

I love that people on the net are so random that they feel that it makes sense to lecture one another on the word - sum up: try the word 'use' instead... I really liked the comment, as I've never knowingly used the word to date and now I can, and do it right! It's strange how excited that makes me.

"If you're going to be picky about language, I feel obliged to point out that "leverage" is a noun, not a verb. "Leverage" is the action of a lever. It's a naming word, not a doing word. Compare with "use" and "usage". To avoid mistakes, every time you are tempted to use the word "leverage" (sales presentations, TPS reports, pillow talk etc), substitute the word "use" instead. It should become obvious which are the cases when "leverage" is the correct choice."

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