A few weeks ago, I did a blog entry mentioning that Conrad Black was considering hiring jury consultants to try and make the former media mogul come across as a regular sort of guy.

Now with Black's fraud trial starting in March, his lawyer has banned him from using words of more than two syllables, reports the Toronto Star.

It won't be easy for Black who can't help showing off his vocabulary. His autobiography, A Life In Progress , is a mind-numbing tome with words like "oleaginous", "senescence" and "saturnine". Or such sentences as "A Wagnerian blitzkrieg in May gave way to a Flaubertesque bourgeois salon farce in June."

Still, the ban on long words (or as Black might call them sesquipedalianisms) is the least of the defendant's problems.

Last week, Black's lawyers were trying to ban the jury from hearing statements his co-defendants made to a Hollinger International Inc. directors committee investigating the alleged looting of the corporation. But US District Judge Amy St Eve has issued a ruling this week denying the motions to split the trial into separate proceedings.

Prosecutors have also accused Black of insider trading.