"Very discrete shipping and billing" - spam message subject

Actually, what the twerp is suggesting is discretion, not discreteness, for his/her dubious pharmaceutical products. However, I guess that the target market is probably not known for its intellectual or grammatical abilities.

Discrete means separate, distinct, self-contained - as in "the population of Uplyme parish lives in several discrete settlements, including Uplyme proper, Holcome, Harcombe and Rocombe".

Discreet means hidden, private or covert, as in "your package of expensive fake pharmaceuticals will be delivered in a discreet brown envelope, so no-one will know how sad you are."

I think that some of the confusion may come from that close relative of discreet: discretion - which has ony one "e".

"Any Form. Any Document. Anywhere. Anytime.

You are global and local
You are agile and regulated
You are speed and quality
You are growth and lean"

You're what?

Who was paid to write this gibberish I wonder? I came across the Teleform site as I'm writing a user guide for a client. I thought I might find out more what the product did, but instead, I came across this wonderful jargon-fest:

"Cardiff Teleform is a cornerstone piece of the Cardiff Intelligent Document solution.   It is the only solution that allows you to unify all of your paper-based processes throughout the enterprise, even processes in different departments, businesses and geographies.   This unified approach ensures you a consistent experience and full auditability of all of your processes.  TeleForm’s bullet-proof enterprise-class design ensures zero down time and unlimited scalability as the number of documents flowing through TeleForm increases. "

I nominate this for the Golden Bull Award. It's as stuffed with meaningless clichés as a plum pudding is with dried fruit. Yummy.

I think it could be summarised as "This product assists your business by automating data capture from forms." But I could be wrong, of course.

"November: With the presidential election looming, George Bush prepares reluctantly to relinquish the reigns of power..." - Practical Builder magazine's Viewpoint column, Jan 2008

No, he has hold of the reins of power.

Monarchs reign, and horsemen hold the reins to steer their steeds. Presidents preside.

Oh, and it never rains but it pours, especially if you don't proof your copy!

Just to keep up the penguin quotient here, a short but rather charming documentary about penguins - to be taken with a large pinch of salt of course, as it was released yesterday:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/epeng001.shtml?src=ip_potpw

- look now, as the clip will only be there for a few more days.

"Dr Charlesworth added that lack of trust about SUDS has also been exasperated by poorly fitted systems..." - NFU Countryside magazine, March 2008.

I don't know if it was the Doctor or the journalist who failed to get it right, but he or she meant exacerbated. Just because the spell checker didn't complain doesn't mean it's the right word! There is no substitute for proper proof-reading or for understanding of difficult words.

Exasperate means to annoy exceedingly; exacerbate means to make worse.