"verbal power" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is typically used to describe someone's ability to communicate effectively and persuasively through spoken words. Example: The politician's verbal power was evident in his powerful speech, swaying the audience to his side.
It's a deliberate attempt to drain the act of violation of its verbal power.
"The Royal Family," which starts out with a brilliant sort of causticity, demonstrates Mr. Vollmann's verbal power and inventiveness.
Reid's rise in the Labour cabinet is directly attributable to this formidable verbal power and his ability intellectually to dazzle the man at Number 10.
Those who saw Waller-Bridge's stage version of Fleabag in Edinburgh or its London transfer described it as "filthy" and "shocking", but it's the verbal power she wields that socks you in the jaw.
I can't be sure, but I have an idea that this fine literary scholar, with one ear perfectly cocked for English poetry and the other for Hebrew poetry, instinctively understood the verbal power of "Raze it, raze it".
There's one giveaway moment in the late, great scene where Richard persuades Queen Elizabeth to yield up her daughter as a future bride: it's a classic demonstration of Richard's diabolical charisma and insinuating verbal power, but here he achieves his ends by having the queen forcibly strapped to a chair.
Even so, a dense portrait emerges of an artist in midcareer who, while creating some of humankind's most harrowing artistic visions -- King Lear," "Othello," "Macbeth" -- simultaneously exhibited an exultant, giddy, even gleeful pleasure in his own ramifying verbal powers.
Like Atom Egoyan's Ararat (which dealt with the 1915 Armenian genocide), the film spends much time feeling less like a movie and more like a verbal power-point presentation.
So next time you have a big meeting, ask yourself whether you're better off 1) as an active, fully engaged participant or 2) frantically scribbling down comprehensive notes for later use, while ignoring critical room dynamics that can turn meetings on a dime -- non-verbal cues, power postures and nuanced changes in tones of voice.
If ma'am is meant as a verbal genuflection to power, the message is lost on many real-life powerful women, like Senator Barbara Boxer, who told a brigadier general to refer to her as "senator" rather than "ma'am" at a hearing last year.
She is best known for her flashing electronic LED sign sculptures that display carefully composed yet fleeting phrases that act as verbal meditations on power, trauma, knowledge, and hope.
