@HS - and thank God we don't have such an equivalent, and that every time the idea has been suggested, from John Dryden onwards, wiser heads have prevailed.

Language is an organic beast, not something to be dictated by an appointed body. All major English-speaking countries are representative democracies and have legal systems based on custom and precedent, not by decree. What's wrong with treating our language in the same way? In any case how many academies would you have? You certainly couldn't have the same one for Britain and America! And then would you have a separate one for New Zealand, for example?

One of the main opponents, incidentally, was Samuel Johnson, who invoked 'English liberty' (Wikipedia).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_an_English_Academy

@jayles - and linguists have shown that some elements of that grammar (in certain verb tenses I think) are in fact more complex that in Standard English; so much for the simplicity and laziness that some people seem to imagine.

@alexandre - I think we all knew that 'if I were you' was an incomplete sentence, hence the three ellipsis dots in the original question.

And as for your second point, the one you want us to THINK TWICE about - if the person was present, why the 'if'? Why didn't they just collect the money - but the use of the modal 'would have' specifically tells us they didn't. This is what is variously known as a Third conditional, a past hypothetical conditional or a past counterfactual conditional.

'If I was you, I would have collected the money' means exactly the same as 'If I were you, I would have collected the money'. The question is whether the first one is grammatically correct, or whether we have to use the subjunctive 'were'. Virtually every modern grammar reference book, as well as most of the ESL/EFL world, thinks it is perfectly grammatical, although admittedly less formal.

Hi providencejim - in the post on my blog (link above) I list the instances of tell about in Sinclair's books, but I'll put them here as well - 68 in all. On my blog there are links to the examples in Google Books.

World's End 1940 - 5
Between Two Worlds 1941 - 2
Dragon's Teeth 1942 - 1
Wide is the Gate 1943 - 7
Presidential Agent 1944 - 3
Dragon Harvest 1945 - 10
A World to Win 1946 - 10
A Presidential Mission 1947- 3
A Giant's Strength 1948 - 16
One Clear Call 2 1948 - 4
Oh Shepherd Speak 1949 - 7

@jayles -Yup. First class this morning was 7.00, so the alarm went at 5.30 (other days are all 7.30 starts). The snow hasn't arrived yet, but it can't be long now. Amongst other places, I teach in one of the largest international legal firms, a famous Silicon Valley tech firm and an international project management firm, as well as one of Poland's biggest banks, a science centre and a Quango. So I come across a fair amount of business language in a fair variety of contexts. Quite a lot of jargon is used, but I rarely hear the horror stuff that people complain about in the press.

@HS - even 'leveraged' has its uses: it's a hell of a lot easier to say 'leveraged buy-out' then 'a buy-out using a significant amount of borrowed money (bonds or loans) to meet the cost of acquisition.' (Investopedia) - even if we stop at 'borrowed money'. This expression is commonly used in both the Economist and the FT, which generally avoid management speak, and I would argue that it's more of a technical term than a piece of management jargon.

When you get up to 100 emails a day (as one or two of my students do), brevity has its advantages.

@jayles and HS - the noun in its figurative sense goes back to 1858 (Online Etymology), and is not, as far as I know an Americanism. As a verb, I repeat, it has two meanings, both of which I agree have come from America.

Although I don't particularly like the all-purpose 'improving' meaning, I have no objection to the financial sense, which is really more to do with terminology than jargon, and I'm sure jayles is right about 'gearing' being the older British equivalent. As for 'mispronunciation', I think that's just HS being provocative. You say tomatoes, I say tomatoes etc.

I repeat, every walk of life has its own jargon - linguists have NPs, bound morphemes etc, on your computer you rip and burn, download and undo, even Brus talks of the Second Declension (or Conjugation), whatever that might be. Why should business be any different?

I do think it's worth separating out the technological jargon from meaningless or baffling business buzzwords. It's quite possible for CEOs to make waffling 'business-speak' statements without using any of the words that appear in these lists at all. Objections to that sort of business speak I can understand, but including any new words just because they are used in corporate business or come from America, I don't. I sometimes wonder if there isn't the tiniest bit of intellectual snobbery at play here.

I teach in large and small corporations, and the way I hear most of these words used is in specific technical senses; not in a meaningless business-speak way at all. I wonder how many of those criticising business language here have much experience of working in modern corporations, and of how this language is actually used inside companies, rather then in newspaper reports.

@Brus - we may have a somewhat arbitrary spelling system, but at least we largely agree how to spell each individual word. That wasn't the case in the past.

Virtually all dictionaries are descriptive nowadays (the OED always was) and are corpora based. Even the American Heritage Dictionary, set up as an antidote to Webster's 3rd International, is pretty well descriptive these days, although helped by 'panels of experts'. A dictionary can give us advice, but its basic job is to tell us the meanings and speaking of words we are likely to hear or see around us. Incidentally, you often find the best usage advice in learners' dictionaries.

@HS - You're quite right of course; that's more or less all it's used for nowadays. I was trying to find as similar a case of a noun being turned into a verb as possible. But there are lots of others, like ship, divorce etc. My point is that people have been turning nouns into verbs for centuries, and it's really only the newer ones that tend to annoy people.

Re: the atrixnet site - interesting list that shows the useful side and the dangerous side of business language. Yes, there are a some bullshit expressions there, like impactful and productize (although even that has some logic - how are we going to convert our idea into a product?), and some I don't particularly like, such as 'incentivize' the ubiquitous (especially on the web) 'monetize'.

But many of these expressions, such as 'B2B' and 'clicks and bricks' are everyday currency in business language (they get used in the Economist and the FT for example). Used individually, they are useful shorthand for anyone in business, and work like any other specialist jargon (in fact quite a few of them, like plug-and-play, are tech jargon, rather than business jargon).

Some of them, such as 'just-in-time' (associated with Toyota) and cross-functional refer to business philosophies and processes, which are always described using these terms (I teach in banks where the role of cross-functional teams play an important role - you could of course, call them multi-disciplinary, but is that really any better?).

Leverage and leverage are interesting, as they have at least three meanings:

The old noun, leverage, which has been used for ages to mean something like advantage - 'Our ability to buy large quantities should give us some leverage when it comes to discussing discounts.'

A specialist meaning in finance - using credit: so we have the technical term 'leveraged buyout' and Obama talking about the American economy at the time of the crisis as being over-leveraged.

But it has also taken on a business bullshit meaning of 'generally improve' - 'I need to see how I can best leverage my career' - and this is the one that has come in for most stick.

I found this out the hard way, arguing with a banker, who knew only the second meaning, at a time when I only knew about the first and third.

But of course some people will string them together into meaningless sentences that are meant to bamboozle. And it it is always this second practice that the critics of business language latch on to. But we could make up just as meaningless rubbish with normal words, of which this site lists quite a few, for example: ethical, global, efficient.

Incidentally, the now defunct Bear Sterns had a hedge fund called the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leveraged Fund, a name made much fun of by the Long Johns in their classic 2007 sketch on the sub-prime crisis - http://youtu.be/z-oIMJMGd1Q

At the cutting edge of spelling - that's a new one on me. Before Johnson, everybody did as Brus suggests, and we had spelling chaos. Dictionaries are surely there to be used. I've better things to do with my time than work these things out 'by logic'.

@Brus - each of us is interested in English for different reasons, and like to go about things in our own individual ways. Some of us like to do a bit of research; what's wrong with that? Surely there is room in PITE for several different approaches.

@HS - would you object to 'case' (noun 14th century) being used as a verb ("enclose in a case," 1570s)? If we can make a compound noun, why not a compound verb? The only difference I can see is that 'showcase' as a verb is relatively new. In this context its use as a noun isn't much older (1937).

@Larkin - I second Hairy Scot - I don't see any reason why surnames should be any different from other nouns - brooch / brooches, church / churches, Goodrich / Goodriches - as in this book - The Goodriches: An American Family

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/goodriches-dane-starbuck/1101351802

There are plenty more examples of "the Goodriches" at Google Books. Google will ask you if you mean Goodrich's, but all the examples of that I can see are possessives.

NB - There are some similar queries at http://painintheenglish.com/case/223

@WW - dour is also known in England, but usually pronounced differently; wee is no doubt pretty universal. It seems the latest Scottish word to catch on in England is 'minging', (red-lined) which in Scotland originally meant smelling badly, but seems to be taking on a meaning among English young people of 'very bad, unpleasant or ugly'.

But if you have place names with loch in the US, why is it that Americans (and the English for that matter) seem to be unable to pronounce it? Which reminds me of these lines from an old music-hall song 'Wee Deoch an Doris made popular by Harry Lauder - 'If you can say, "It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht",Then yer a'richt, ye ken.'

red(d) up does indeed seem to mean clean or tidy up, and appears to have gone to America from Scotland, but I don't think I've ever heard it in Scotland.

My list was of Scottish words used in Standard Scottish English, not dialect. If we include dialect words that non-dialect-speakers like myself understand, we can add hundreds of others, for example:

lum - chimney - Lang may your lum reek
reek - smoke (Edinburgh was known as Auld Reekie, just like London was 'the Big Smoke')
it's a sair fecht - (approximately) it's a hard life

and words also used in parts of the North of England, like:

ken - know
bairn - child
kirk - church
ken - know

AnWulf - I grant you that most British dictionaries list it as babysit, but Collins lists it as baby-sit, and American Heritage, Random House and Etymology Online list it with both spellings. I admittedly took it from proofread.com without checking.