In this marvellous post, Tim Phillips rails against the proliferation of meaningless filler words in media releases.
Vague non-words like significant and substantial look like they’re telling us something, but they aren’t. They’re useful for people who have a deadline but no clear idea what they’re writing about; or people who know the numbers, don’t want to tell us what they are, but want to waste our time anyway because that’s what they’re paid to do. Often they are paid by the word, so chucking in a “substantial” here and there is basically free money.
To demonstrate this, he searches through the Factiva database. He found the number of media releases containing words such as ‘significant’ and ‘unique’ has remained fairly constant since 2002. However, the number of media releases containing all four words – significant and substantial and meaningful and unique – has tripled.