It’s the start of the new year and the UK is sitting on a glut of unwanted Christmas presents. Matching present to person is seldom an easy task. It takes time and effort. But in the run up to Christmas, many people will have taken a wild stab in the dark;...

As we continue our ceaseless quest to seek out and rehabilitate the bulls of business-speak, we come up against an old and imposing foe. Imagine yourself, if you will, a few short days from now. You are sat at your computer; you’ve just completed your Christmas...

Rob Ashton explains how developing your writing skills can help you to win sales. Whether you love them or hate them, you can’t deny that reality TV shows such as The X-Factor provide contestants with honest feedback about their performances. After the tone-deaf...

After the resounding success of our gobbledygook amnesty, we realise there are obviously many concerned citizens out there who share the desire to eliminate overblown double-speak wherever it is found. So the quest continues: to seek out, capture and rehabilitate any...

When most people think of Leonardo da Vinci, they think of him as the artist who painted The Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. But da Vinci was also an inventor, an architect, a musician and an engineer. To be successful as a nurse manager, you need to adopt da...

As the seasons turn and the nights draw in, we continue to track how often the terms 'recovery' and 'green shoots' appear in the broadsheets. And we ask: can we look to the newspapers for renewed hope, or mere cold comfort? With only the most intermittent exception,...

It is 40 years ago, almost to the day, that the internet made its first connection. On 29 October 1969, a computer in the University of California connected with one several hundred miles away in the Stanford Research Institute, just long enough to receive the message...

A new dictionary is set to make sense of that most inscrutable of languages: teen speak. This comprehensive reference book, called Pimp Your Vocab, aims to allow bemused parents and teachers to comprehend such ‘teenglish’ terms as ‘owned’...

You may remember that, back in July, we threw down a gobbledygook gauntlet, by calling an amnesty on business double-speak and offering a prize for the biggest offender. After painful hours of digging through piles of tangled, mangled English, we can present you with...

It's amazing how many good ideas are lost in translation – not from one language to another, but from the brain to the printed page. One reason could be that it's so tempting, when you suddenly find that you're unable to get your idea down on paper effectively,...

Whether the message is good, bad or indifferent; now is no time for silence, says Rob Ashton.   During the ancient wars, if you wanted to deliver a message you hired a messenger to hand over the scroll personally. But approaching enemy lines to pass on bad news...