Does verbosity come from having lots of time to kill?

John Cadley writes a humor column called Funny You Should Say That that appears at the back of Toastmaster magazine. For the May 2019 issue it was titled Verbosity with a long subtitle - Why do we use more words than we need when we could say what we mean with fewer words?

John pointed out how we use excess verbiage and say due to the fact that rather than just although, or at this point in time rather than just now. He pointed to the Fearless Flyer newsletter from Trader Joes as an example of prolixity. But he did not theorize about why we get more verbose and kill time when common sense would suggest we instead should be getting less verbose due to the faster pace of modern life.

One possible culprit is radio coverage of professional baseball games. An article at Sports Illustrated by Scooby Axson on October 2, 2017 noted the Average MLB game time rises to record 3:05. That is 185 minutes. At PunditFact on April 6, 2018 there was another article by Louis Jacobson which asked Are there only 18 minutes of action in a baseball game?, and found there indeed were. 18 minutes is a single TED talk! So less than 10% of a ballgame is action. Most of the other 90%  (other than commercials) is filled by a color commentator - a second sports commentator who assists the main play-by-play commentator by filling the time between plays. Typically he adds anecdotes and background about statistics, strategy, and injuries. 

Another possible culprit is talk radio. Rather suspiciously a typical syndicated show (like Rush Limbaugh) also lasts for three hours. In a comedy routine by Lewis Black mistitled Facebook rather than Same Arguments that you can listen to on YouTube he laments (using very bad language):   

“One of the reasons that I feel we that we age in this country is because from the time you’re born until the day you die you listen to the same arguments over and over and over and over again. They never end. They don’t. Major issues - we bang them back and forth all the time. We’re a democracy, and that’s what you do. That’s one of the prices we pay for having a democracy, is to discuss things until our ears bleed.”  

The time to kill image came from a World War II poster of a B-26 Marauders strafing. I was reminded of a 1975 Soundstage TV show titled 60 Minutes to Kill, which can be seen on YouTube. 

UPDATE  

Sometimes filling up time has a wonderful side effect. Hugh Masekela’s trumpet instrumental Grazing in the Grass, which hit number one in the Billboard Hot 100 chart, reportedly was created because his album was running about three minutes short of the contracted for 30-minute length.

On March 20, 2019 there was a Sheldon comic that ended by describing an extremely verbose alternative title for the musical Cats: 

“Adult humans who could be doing something else, who have chosen to dress up in cat suits and sing for you in the dark.”