Critical decision units, they called them. Or CDUs, to make them sound important. But they were just rooms with no proper facilities where staff at Mid Staffordshire NHS dumped unassessed patients to meet four-hour waiting-time targets.

In these critical decision units, critical decisions weren't taken. One didn't have any staff. In the other, the Healthcare Commission says, patients were left for three days or more. CDUs were a sham, a cheat.

What killed hundreds of people in Mid Staffordshire was semantics; the first big case of death by empty words. It won't be the last. Incompetence was an accomplice - it always is - but the main culprit was the cloak of evasive language.

The entire health service floats on an Orwellian sea of newspeak strategies, policies, stakeholders, parameters, benchmarking, outcomes, actioning, pathfinding. Third-rate jargon, that great weapon of the inadequate, has become the accepted way to con the public - sorry, service users. And create jobs too - because someone spends a lot of time writing the bloody stuff.

It is all about aggrandisement. Mid Staffs boasts a “finance directorate”, “strategic governance” and a “comprehensive Integrated Business Plan, which contains an extensive analysis of the factors that could drive demand and a detailed PESTLE (political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental) analysis”.

But this “pestle” was useless when it couldn't predict the unwanted patients shuffled into side rooms.

If managers had spent less time on “a programme of agreed audit activity which facilitates a review of existing controls and recommends appropriate remedial action or systems redesign”, patients might not have had to drink out of flower vases.

In September 2007, Mid Staffordshire sighed: “Turning the theory of patient and public partnership into reality where users of the service become integral to its development is a real challenge.” You bet it is, because the public don't speak gobbledegook. And they see that the job of a hospital trust is not to produce impenetrable words, but - radical idea, this - a bed, clean sheets and treatment.

Yesterday the Local Government Association told members to cut out 200 expressions, such as fast-track and revenue stream, on the ground that they are meaningless. Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, trumped them all with “passive drinking”. For solace, there is the genuine nonsense of Edward Lear:

“There was an Old Lady of Prague,
Whose language was horribly vague;
When they said, 'Are these caps?'
She answered, 'Perhaps!'
That oracular Lady of Prague.”

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