Grammar Moses: What's a little verbiage between friends?

Ted Utchen of Wheaton has written me several times with column suggestions that, owing to their complexity, would require an episodic approach.

Because I fear that wouldn't work well in a column that carries a minimum of three topics, I've never cited Ted. But then came his bite-sized suggestion that I explore the following headline that ran last Sunday: "Shrubs can be trained to lay flat against a wall."

Ted's point is that "lay" is a transitive verb. You "lay" something down.

A shrub would "lie" flat against a wall.

Or would it? My way of thinking is that lying is a horizontal pursuit, whereas one would "lean" something against a wall. Can something "lie flat" against a vertical surface?

Sounds like a new headline is in order.

Verbiage

You'll hear this in business settings all the time:

"Just add some verbiage and … "

I hear it every day in my place of employment, a place where verbiage is a particularly foul thing.

I infer from the usage that "verbiage" is considered a synonym for "words."

My Webster's New World Dictionary defines it as "an excess of words beyond those needed to express concisely what is meant; wordiness."

It would be redundant to say "excess verbiage" and a misnomer to say "a little verbiage."

Now the Oxford English Dictionary offers an excess of words as its primary definition but allows a U.S. usage equivalent to "words." But I'd guess that is a concession that Americans misuse it often.

To hyphenate or not?

Louise Novello of Des Plaines wrote to ask me to explain two things: when to hyphenate three words and what's up with the title of "America's Got Talent."

Consider the difference between the following two sentences, which have the same meaning and are punctuated properly:

Joe is a 4-year-old boy.

Joe is 4 years old.

Why are there hyphens in the first sentence but not the second?

In the first sentence, "4-year-old" serves as a compound modifier that directly precedes "boy." The hyphens are there to scrunch the words together (if you don't mind me using technical language.)

As for "America's Got Talent," if you want to be a stickler about it the name of the show should be "America Has Talent."

Or, better yet, "Americans Have Talent."

The "got" is superfluous.

While I love our annual "Suburban Chicago's Got Talent" contest, the name has given me a minor twitch.

Exuberant memo

Not too long ago, I explored the use of "holey appropriate." That prompted Melynda Findlay, a member of our night copy desk, to tell me about a memo the former property manager at her apartment complex distributed asking residents not to move or damage the rocks around the pond because the cost to replace them is "exuberant."

Clearly, the intended word was "exorbitant." Replacing expensive rocks certainly is nothing one would do with exuberance.

"I actually pulled out a pen and fixed the ones I saw on my way from the garage to our place," Mel said, proving that you don't stop being a copy editor when you put the paper to bed.

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line.