Is this post verbal communication?
It's neither oral nor spoken, so ...
Amanda Petrovski, of Exeter, N.H., writes: “Why must people say verbal agreement instead of oral agreement, verbal communication instead of oral communication, etc.?” Obviously, verbal has to do with both spoken and written words. I’d buy ‘They settled it with a verbal agreement rather than a handshake,’ but that doesn’t tell us whether the agreement was spoken or written.”
Amanda, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that this battle was joined in the 14th century, and your side has lost decisively. The OED says: “It has sometimes been argued (e.g. in H. W. Fowler Dict. Mod. Eng. Usage (1926) 689/1) that the use of verbal in this sense is incorrect and that oral should be preferred. However, verbal is well established in this sense and is the usual term in certain expressions, such as verbal communication, verbal contract, and verbal evidence.”
My sense is that oral did not prevail because we associate it mainly with things other than speech. The News on the Web corpus (consisting of “20.3 billion words of data from web-based newspapers and magazines from 2010 to the present time,” in context, shows that the noun that most commonly comes after oral in its database is sex. Next most common is health.
Spoken agreement would make the point you want made — but that phrase is very uncommon.
Plenty of ordinary phrases and sentences can be ambiguous: Is from 2020 to 2024 four years or five? Does You can’t have too much money mean it’s unlikely you have much money or it’s impossible for you to have too much? A few classic ambiguous sentences are Miners refuse to work after death, Prostitutes appeal to the Pope, and Fruit flies like a banana. But in these cases, as with verbal agreement, context plus common sense almost always make clear what’s meant.
If you have other favorite ambiguous expressions, you’re more than welcome to share them in the comments.
And email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.