Did I say "meat"? Try "protein packs", maybe.You can also see why "abortion" has almost given way to "termination" You terminate a pregnancy - which is a state or a condition. You abort a foetus - which is a human being.Bernard Levin believed all euphemisms are lies. He admired the writer Marghanita Laski, who translated "simple, inexpensive gowns for the fuller figure" into "nasty, cheap dresses for fat old women".I spoke on Today to a man from Scottish and Southern Energy about what his company was doing to the countryside and he resolutely refused to use the word "pylon". Instead there are "build quality issues".The motivation for euphemism is usually pretty clear. "Slaughterhouse" gave way to "abattoir" because the sound of the French word has none of the savagery of "slaughter", with its reminder of what happened to the sweet little lamb that has ended up as chops on the butcher's shelf.I guarantee that "butcher" will be the next to go. No doubt when all our local butchers have been driven out of business the supermarkets will find a cosier word for their rows of chill cabinets masquerading as a butcher's shop.Our grandchildren will never see blood dripping from a butchered joint on a slab and they will be encouraged to think all meat comes naturally wrapped in cellophane. When the builders finally got around to apologising this was how they put it: "We were aware of the build quality issues ...."Here is a company building houses that make the buyers' lives a misery and they still cannot bring themselves to use that simple word, "problems".

And can anyone remember when we met people instead of "meeting up with"?Then again, maybe I should chill out - or possibly just "chill".Euphemism is another enemy of good, simple language. People who bought houses on a new development in Weston-super-Mare last year had terrible problems: uneven floors; dangerous wiring; windows and roof tiles that did not fit. In one case the entire front of a house had to be removed because the brickwork was so shoddy. Things are "opposite to" (which compounds the felony), "up against", "off of" and "up until".

We "test out", "raise up", "descend down", "revert back", "separate out", "free up", "enter in", "divide up", "exit out" and "feed into". It is not only estate agents who insist that a house "comprises of" three bedrooms. We write "all of" when we need no more than "all" and we even double up prepositions to be on the safe side. Traffic warnings on the radio tell you roadworks are "still continuing", probably adding that they do so "at this moment in time", as though a moment could be in anything else.Some of the obesity comes from our relatively recent tendency to sprinkle prepositions where they should not be We attach them to verbs which are self-sufficient.

I know how you enhance; I am damned if I know how you "enhance further".You see signs along the road informing you of "delays due to an earlier accident", as though they could be due to a later one. Children have temper tantrums and politicians announce "new initiatives" - though maybe that is to distinguish them from the many "initiatives" that are recycled versions of failed old ones. We say "from whence" and "he is currently the chairman..."Why "currently"? What does "is" mean if not "currently"? I am offered news headlines reporting "the planned talks have been cancelled." How could they be cancelled if they had not been "planned"? Or perhaps they were not cancelled and are "still continuing". Why "still"? One of the BBC's published objectives for 2005 is to "enhance further the impact" of its global news services. If you want to aspire to any sort of academic achievement you need to be able to express yourself clearly. Or am I missing something here? How can you assess the quality of someone's mind if they cannot tell you what they know and how they think?Let us kill off for once and for all the conspiracy theory - developed by liberal educationists in the Sixties - that the teaching of English was controlled by the ruling class and we, the lumpen proletariat, were victims of class oppression.

The way to win our freedom, they said, was to refuse the straitjacket of rules and express ourselves as we chose. It was tosh then and it is tosh today.If we were indeed being oppressed, the liberals should have realised that the way to overcome our oppressor was to use his own weapon against him: good English. Rules do not confine; they liberate.But that's only part of the story Sentences can be perfectly grammatical and deeply boring They can also be meaningless. Our language is showing signs of obesity, which is the consequence of feeding on junk words. Tautology is the equivalent of having chips with rice.We talk of future plans and past history; of live survivors and safe havens.