There will come an awful moment during my lifetime when children will grow up not knowing what words (that I quite like) meant before they were eased through the corporate pulp mill.

I’m not concerned about semantic shift – that’s where a word’s definition evolves over time, and it’s been happening since we’ve had language. “Awful”, from the sentence above, for example, was defined as “inspiring awe” in the 1964 Oxford Dictionary, but is defined as “very bad or unpleasant” today.

What worries me is a future in which my shimmering simulacrum tells my grandchildren the word “align” used to mean “put things in a straight line” and they laugh at me mockingly and say “shut up, holoPop, it actually refers to the strategic, vertical integration of organisational structures for more efficient and effective synergisational oneness across the end-to-end cybermarket journey.

Alignment today is one of the many thousands of words that has been commandeered by the business world and put to use with a woeful lack of consistency or clarity. For some, it’s a weasel synonym for “agreement” (“Roger and I are in alignment on that point”). For others it connotes some kind of corporate neatening (“After the reactor meltdown, we’re reviewing procedures and aligning management functions”). For most it’s a nebulous catch-all, “... and we’ll get there by living and breathing our brand truths, and by aligning our platforms”.

Now, like so many of its once-fine linguistic peers it means everything and nothing at the same time.

What worries me is not that my grandchildren will have lost a perfectly good definition, but that they won’t have gained one to replace it.