I have one rule of thumb with companies:

If I don't understand what they are doing, and they can't or won't explain(Q: So what do you do? A: We leverage our capabilities to provide clients with groundbreaking services [don't laugh, I actually had that conversation two weeks ago with a company that shall, for now, remain nameless]), then I know I am looking at trouble. When all I get is BS, I know they are hiding something. That's usually a dead give-away.

Take a look, for example at the way Enron and WorldCom used jargon to sell dubious strategy and stifle dissent. Terms like "seedware" (promotional software) and "WOMBAT" (waste of money, brains and time) came with the territory.

That is why I was interested when the Securities and Exchange Commission at the beginning of this year issued a proposed rule requiring companies to using plain English in their corporate disclosures. Philippa Maister looks at the SEC's New Role: Grammar Police .

She quotes SEC chairman Christopher Cox giving his explanation for the war on vague words:

"That's the only way that investors will be able to figure out who did what to whom."

Her piece offers specific tips on how to write plain English, including consulting the SEC's own Plain English Handbook.

An even better guide is George Orwell's classic essay Politics And The English Language. Orwell understood how jargon can be used to distort and to mislead:

"When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink''. Language, he said, could also corrupt thought. "Every such phrase anaesthetises a portion of one's brain.''

If he were alive today, Orwell would agree that of all linguistic frauds, the lexicon of business is the worst. That's the one that does the most damage, not only to the English language but to the running of companies and to investors.

The business world is bedevilled by meaningless and slipshod jargon, a mix of euphemisms designed to mislead and deceive, clumsily constructed gobbledygook and terminology. Human resources staff turn into "personal development officers'', taxpayers become "customers'', and "customer relationship management'' is as much about identifying the least profitable ones - and either getting rid of them or squeezing them for more - as it is about targeting big spenders.

More examples of sloppy jargon include: on the same page, skin in the game, thought leadership, quality action team (QAT), paradigm shift, take that offline, out of the loop, go the extra mile, result-focused, client-focused, total quality, ballpark, ticks in boxes, value-add, touch base, core business, thinking outside the square, stretching the envelope, putting this one to bed, closing the loop, at the end of the day, hot button, interface, guesstimate, key players, killer apps, focus collectively as a group, user friendly, bells and whistles, benchmark, declining core technology, slippery slide, fast track, win-win, game plan.

Any others to add?

The significance of the bad grammar is not that it's sloppy. It's more that it can create disasters because it encourages people to do anything they want. When words become meaningless, there is no relationship between their actions and any defined specific vocabulary. And that's dangerous because it allows companies to pull the wool over our eyes.