“Breakthrough thinking from top twaddlists”

Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway has announced her Annual Management Twaddle Awards - booby prizes for the stupidest business practices of the year. Among her prizes is the Martin Lukes Creovation award (named after the protagonist of her hilarious satire on business life, Who Moved My Blackberry?), “for combining two good words to make one bad one.”

After much debate, bronze goes to IBM Global Services for coming up with the “flex-pon-sive company”. The silver award is won by the European Council for urging member states to adopt a “Flexicurity approach” to policy. But the gold award goes to Eversheds which is looking for trainee lawyers who are knowlivators (knowledgeable motivators), proactilopers (proactive developers) and five other clumping concepts that sound more like dinosaurs than legal eagles.

Proactilopers? The horror, the semantic horror. My only consolation for having this Frankenstein word now lodged in my head is that I can fantasize about a herd of saurian lawyers - tails whipping, ties flapping, tiny clawed arms flailing - howling as they pounce on the Eversheds HR manager who came up with the term, and rip him into confetti. He’s screaming. Ahh. That’s better.

Yet this linguistic atrocity doesn’t constitute the year’s ultimate horror. That honor goes to the BBC, which wins Kellaway’s top team-bonding award.

Its senior journalists and presenters were made to cuddle plastic baby dolls that screamed, and then walk barefoot through raspberry jelly and finally to wash the jam off each other’s feet.

I’d rather be eaten by proactilopers.