Could you please explain the war on verbs? I can't really seem to find exactly what it is from that google search you linked.
Dang, the search phrase is an old idea for me, and I didn't look closely at what shows up on a fresh search--the first Google hit at the moment is for shit, IMO. But then the b*ogosphere is hardly very helpful yet for folks who at least half-like a good bibliography.
The general 'war on verbs' thing is related to how PowerPoint can make you dumb. Basically, a bunch of different factors have converged to create a context where leaders in both the public and private sectors are structurally motivated to avoid using clear language, i.e. the basic subject-verb-object sentence structure in most (all?) Indo-European languages.
At its roots, the 'war on verbs' is about being able to speak persuasively in public without serious accountability because almost all of the speaker's words are nouns or modifiers while the speaker's overall rhthym makes it seem as if the speaker is using actual sentences. It doesn't happen at every press conference, but if you listen to enough public and private sector leaders talk to a camera horde, you'll be able to notice some of them genereally avoiding anything like a real sentence, and those folks are often at the top of their particular heap.
