About a year ago (I treasure these things), the president of MediaSpan Media Software explained the change of the company name in these words: "The name change coincides with internal synergies we are leveraging across the entire MediaSpan organization to expand our product offerings."

No doubt some more adept student of hermeneutics than I could mine a meaning from that sentence, but I suspect that it is, like many corporate pronouncements,  mainly a kind of white noise meant to lull analysts and shareholders into a refreshing repose. (Unless it means that we will get more work out of fewer people, surprise, surprise.)

Observers as diverse as George Orwell in his classic "Politics and the English Language" and Ken Smith in his refreshingly angry little book of 1991, Junk English, have pointed out how commonly catchphrases, vogue usages and other prefabricated verbal units are used to conceal an unpleasant meaning or to disguise the speaker’s/writer’s complete absence of thought. If we wish to agree that the English language is being corrupted -- a dubious proposition -- it is surely more at risk from perpetrators of meaninglessness than from people who use ain’t or hopefully.

It is a hard thing to follow Dr. Johnson’s advice to "clear your mind of cant." The derivation of the word itself suggests a source of the problem. Cant, or "insincere or meaningless talk used mainly from convention or habit," as Webster’s New World College Dictionary helpfully explains, comes from the Latin cantus, or song, or from the verb cantare, to sing. Cant is like the annoying jingle that lodges in the head. It sounds like meaning but has no substance.

So people who want to appear to be deep thinkers lard their speech and writing with words like paradigm (model? pattern? concept?). Or they string together a series of these buzzwords, in the manner of the president of MediaSpan. Or they lean on tiresome catchphrases like think outside the box. They are exceptionally fond of the noun-noun-noun compound. These are easy to make up -- growth baseline indicators or service delivery system or liability incident documentation. If your own inventiveness flags, do a Google search on jargon generator to find a device customized for your business or profession.

Their attachment to euphemism is equally profound. I’m wary of the news media’s recent infatuation with the word surge to describe the administration’s plans in Iraq. A surge is a sudden and temporary phenomenon. Reassuring, eh? Escalation, of course, carries the connotation of a previous administration’s foreign involvement. But troop increase is factual and straightforward, though difficult to wedge into the space allotted for headlines.   

Very little can be done for people for whom the combination of pomposity with lack of imagination or actual intellectual dishonesty is irresistible. But we can school ourselves to speak plainly, to insist on meaning, to resist, to clear our own minds.