Our dubious doctor receives an invitation to apply to Harvard Business School’s program on leadership that was clearly written using the meaningless, bland, long-winded language of the typical academic bureaucrat—or communist party apparatchik—that would have made Comrade Brezhnev blush.

But it would be a mistake to suppose that, just because the words and sentences uttered have no clear meaning, that they have no purpose. On the contrary, they have a very important purpose. The mastery of this kind of language is the managerial equivalent of freemasons’ ceremonies: it distinguishes the managers from the managed.