The English language is being destroyed by a "deadly virus of management speak" which has infected the mouths and minds of politicians like U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a leading journalist said Monday.

Bush and his ally Blair are mangling the language, destroying its meaning by avoiding the use of verbs, twisting nouns into verbs, and endlessly repeating phrases until they become "zombified," according to a story posted Wednesday in the on-line Shenzhen Daily.

"It's deeply depressing," says John Humphrys, one of Britain's leading political journalists and the author of a new book, Lost for Words, about the demise of the language.

Humphrys' book laments the growth of "cliched, dumbed-down, inflated and bogus management-speak" which he says now passes for English.

In particular he criticizes political leaders for being sucked into using meaningless phrases and hackneyed mantras to disguise policies or protect themselves from accountability.

Humphrys has been a journalist for 45 years and in his current post as a presenter on BBC radio's news. He regularly interviews world leaders.

Humphrys says the original culprits in the destruction of English are "business gurus who are trying to sell their own particular theories and have invented their own ridiculous phrases and vocabulary to accompany those theories."

For him, the more sinister development is that such language has taken root in political discourse.

Humphry spicks on Bush -- who once famously used the word "misunderestimate" -- and pokes fun at him as someone who "often speaks as though English were his second language."

Humphrys notes Blair's apparent fear of verbs and mocks his speeches, which are peppered with verbless phrases like "new challenges, new ideas," or "for our young people, a brighter future" and "the age of achievement, at home and abroad".

By using this technique, Humphrys says, Blair is simply evading responsibility.

"The point about verbs is that they commit the speaker," he writes. "Verbs cement sentences to their meaning so it's not surprising that politicians tend to mistrust them."

Source: Shenzhen Daily/Agencies