Obiter, long a defender of our noble Queen’s English, is saddened to report that marketing speak has penetrated the upper echelons of the profession. None other than the lord chief justice of England and Wales was last week heard to bemoan the Evershed Committee’s failure to indulge, between 1947 and 1953, ‘in some blue-sky thinking’.

If such usage wasn’t disgraceful enough, the LCJ accused that same group of failing to ‘shed the inhibitions that come from remaining in the box’.

Worse was still to come, as the audience, listening to the LCJ’s speech, ‘Reshaping Justice’, heard that the committee had ducked ‘pushing the envelope towards a thought shower’. Obiter’s kindest theory is that the LCJ had an ironic intent behind rehearsing such phrases.

We shall run this theory up the flagpole and see who salutes.

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