BULLFIGHTING is great fun - and before you all reach for the green ink or telephone the editor, no animals are hurt in this sport. No animals even take part in it; it's a battle of words.

It's also the only example I can find of "braining up" - the opposite, in a new edition of Collins English Dictionary, of dumbing down. (On that point, surely it should be Collins' dictionary.)

It's quite ironic, as I suspect that "braining up" is just the sort of jargon the Bullfighter leaps on in his search and destroy mission.

He's a computer program designed to weed out jargon, sired by Deloitte Consulting and out of the monumental business cat's cradle that was Enron a couple of years ago.

Deloitte found that, the deeper Enron got into the financial doo-dah, the deeper its communications got into meaningless jargon, so Deloitte developed Bullfighter. Test runs showed that companies which expressed themselves clearly were also those which performed better financially.

With meaningless words like incentivise and envisioneer, I can see the need.

A quick trawl through a company report, aided by nothing more than my reading specs, yielded "to live our brand values" and "end-to-end service experience" in one paragraph.

Bullfighter's least favourite word, leverage, was also in evidence. Wonder if it's time to sell the shares!

Someone must have found other examples of braining up for the term to be invented but, as the news of its existence coincided with reading of a soon-to-be-proposed, Alice in Wonderland, all must have prizes, exam to replace GCSE and A-levels, I fear it may be extinct before Collins' next edition.

Utter gloom was averted by eavesdropping - or whatever one does on interactive web sites - on a lively debate among twenty-somethings about the phrase "table stationery", seen in a supermarket above a display of paper plates, napkins and such.

They didn't like it, but no-one could offer a better, all-embracing description of the stuff and I expect "table stationery" arose out of the need to find something for the sign over the shop aisle.

"Disposable tableware" might do, but doesn't have quite the tone of table stationery.

The debate progressed, however, to when toilet paper became toilet tissue.

At about the time we bucked the Bronco, I'd say, and at first simply to distinguish the soft variety.

Nobody suggested the simpler "toilet roll" and when I was small it was lavatory paper anyway.

And here's a new word for you. Tottle.

It is, in the packaging trade if not yet in Collins' dictionary, one of those bottles which stands on its cap, usually on the bathroom shelf and containing shampoo or shower gel.

I wonder who thought that up, and why.