Attentive observers will have noted that this column has had no truck with the great squall of windbaggery that is new year’s resolutions.

And from this it's hard to avoid the unsettling conclusion that a bit of windbaggery can work better than wisdom to insure the public good, at least sometimes.

The evening in mind came almost six months after Neil Kinnock's windbaggery let a wriggling Mrs Thatcher off the hook.

But when you speak to her, what you hear is not windbaggery but carefully-argued polemic, put for the most part in an extremely gentle and reasonable way.

Berlinguer's speech was pure reformist windbaggery - deadly dangerous with its poisonous anti-communism to all workers, and villainously spewed out under the "Communist" label.

Jazz Meets Rap Discussions about the connection between jazz and rap have produced fights, windbaggery and even an occasional intelligent comment.

In high culture, impenetrable jargon has become so rife that art critics and curators recently met in New York to discuss whether windbaggery is eroding interest in contemporary art.

Indeed, there’s a sort of implied rebuke in its pages to the prestidigitation and windbaggery of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, a mirror image of which Scenes superficially resembles.

His language seems to draw more on the windbaggery of our day than his own: his backers learn Mars "may well be the force that makes us... courageous in facing our global challenges."

The First Amendment will thus be protected, but without free air time there will be little motivation for the participants to indulge in the hyperbolic rhetorical excesses and general windbaggery that have characterized the proceedings so far.

We have reached the point in pre-Super Bowl windbaggery when we are actually paying attention to what Madonna has to say about Rob Gronkowski’s sprained ankle and have dutifully recorded that she believes he should tape it up and play.

To clown about people who assemble a credible case for worrying about America's future, calling their concerns "windbaggery," befits the Harvard Lampoon, not the newspaper that ran a thoughtful editorial on Medicare, Mr. Peterson's central topic, on the same day.

The News of the World accused the French of wallowing in "hypocritical slush" about the Revolution, and the Sunday Express hailed Mrs. Thatcher as "the only world leader bold enough to deflate the windbaggery of the French Government."

They also produced all the bonus drama the investors could have desired, from an outbreak of handbaggery between Neil Lennon and Ally McCoist to a gale of windbaggery when Alex Salmond, senior policeman and other worthies jostled their way into the picture.

Throughout, O'Conner, a former copy editor at the Book Review, prefers jesting to scolding and dispenses wisdom with a light touch: "Avoid the kind of pompous language used by people you'd like to punch in the nose"; get rid of "windbaggery and artificial sweeteners"; cross out "superfluous redundancies."

This was mere windbaggery – the word “sustainable” is conveniently vague, as ever; and students of the glossy annual reports of our failed banks will know that it was generally those who paid most lip-service to “corporate responsibility” – notably RBS and Northern Rock – that managed to do the greatest damage to their own shareholders.