It is a truly terrible thing to be branded a pedant. You become simultaneously the best friend and target of a legion of green-ink writers and assorted loonies who assume that because you don’t much care for split infinitives you must, by definition, agree with their own concerns. Not that “concerns” begins to do justice to them. “Obsessions” might just about be adequate.

What can be said for someone who “writhes in frustration” whenever she is asked: “What did you say your name was?” She knows that her questioner wants to know what her name is and not what it was, but it still drives her up the wall. She is, I think it’s fair to say, obsessed with it.

I have a fine collection of letters from pedants. Not as many, I dare say, as Lynne Truss whose concern (obsession?) with punctuation has made her very rich indeed, but enough to keep a Polish carpenter employed for half a day building new shelves for them all.

You may wonder why I keep them. The truth is they come in very handy if you write books about English. I wrote one a couple of years ago, Lost For Words, and the response was - how can I put this without sounding ungracious to my correspondents? - overwhelming. It was also gratifying.

Pedants may be a little single-minded. It is likely that you would not choose to sit next to one on a flight to Perth. But, by golly, we need them - and by “we” I do not mean only those of us who hope they will buy our books. I mean anyone who cares for the English language.

It may well be true that if hardline pedants ruled the linguistic world the language would be somewhat limited. We would be unable to communicate with our cousins across the Atlantic (I’m making the assumption that we manage that at present), and, even though some Americanisms are like fingernails on blackboards, our language would be poorer without their influence.

But pedants are useful in the way that the canary is useful in a coal mine. If there is no one out there to lament the passing of a rule of grammar, we shall end up with no rules. Then where should we be?

Well, actually, we should be in most English classrooms from the mid-1960s on - which is the main reason I wrote my first book. Whoever decided to stop teaching children the rules of grammar deserves to be locked up in a sealed room full of pedants and stabbed to death with fountain pens loaded with green ink. It was crass and we are paying the price to this day.

My second book, Beyond Words, is more concerned with what our changing use of language reveals about the way we live now. There is one thing we have in common. All of us. You and I and the slightly menacing young hoodie hanging around on the street corner. We all care about language. Your concern may be different from the young hoodie’s. The true pedant might contemplate climbing Everest naked before ending a sentence with a preposition. The hoodie cares just as passionately about using language that proves his street cred.

His language is changing almost daily. A word that was a compliment yesterday may be an insult tomorrow. It’s so not cool any longer to flatter me by telling me I’m wicked. If you wanna get down with me I’m safe, but big tings are gwang, know what I mean?

You probably don’t and you - dear reader of the FT Magazine - are not expected to. Indeed, if you did understand, it would already be out of date. By the time we crumblies had caught on to what “bling” meant, it had long since been abandoned on the street.

Our own version of English is changing too and those changes tell us a great deal about the way we live now: about our attitudes, how we see things and how we are seen by others. Nowhere is it more revealing and, in many respects, more pernicious than in the world where “hype” is all.

Of course there has always been hype. It has been with us since the birth of the modern advertising and marketing industry: a low-level noise to which we have become so accustomed we barely pay it any attention. What is different now is that it has moved beyond the world of the hucksters who are obviously trying to sell us something dodgy and has become pervasive.

It has also become so much more... well, hyper. Maybe that’s inevitable. The more of it there is, the more we become inured to it and the higher they have to raise the bar. The supermarkets are pretty good at it - always trying to persuade us how thrilling it will be if we share our shopping experience with them. Note “experience”. We don’t go shopping any longer. We have an “experience”. This is typical of supermarket hype: “Exciting changes to your Nectar card!”

That was a recent promise from Sainsbury’s contained in one of those irritating flyers that fall out of the newspapers every morning. What can they possibly be offering that’s so exciting? A chance to do your next big shop for free? Or a case of vintage champagne with every purchase over a fiver? Or even a guarantee that you won’t have to wait for more than an hour at the check-out unless you do your shopping at 3am on Sundays? Not exactly. It was this: “Ever wished you could use your Nectar points in more than just one Sainsbury’s store?”

As it happens I’ve wished for many things in my life. I could probably offer you a list of a hundred things right now - everything from world peace and an end to poverty to a really good pint of bitter. But, if I ever gave it a thought, I suppose I assumed that a giant supermarket chain with computers powerful enough to map the human genome had probably already made it possible to use my points in more than one of their stores. That’s assuming I had any points in the first place - which I don’t because my local market and corner shops have everything I need and (whisper it quietly) are often cheaper. This sort of thing gives hype a bad name.

The language of hype does not come with a big flashing sign saying “Hi Sucker!”. Its vocabulary is limited to remarkably few familiar words: “brilliant”, “exciting”, “fun”, “simple”. One of the most cherished in the lexicon of hype is “great”. Hypesters need “great” as a drowning man needs a life belt. And this tediously over-used adjective can find itself attached to some very strange words. Try this, for example: “We’d like to say to people: ‘We’re warm and breathing. We’ve got great product. Come and have a look.’”

Those are the words of Stuart Rose, the man who took over Marks and Spencer when it was on its knees and put it back on its feet. But “great product”? Great knickers, maybe. Or great skirts or even great fish cakes, but has anyone in the real world ever said to anyone else: “I really must nip into M&S. I’m told they’ve got great product”? And it’s not as if Mr Rose is one of those executives who seems incapable of speaking plain English. Here’s how he described a disastrous revamp of the big M&S store in Birmingham: “We screwed up big time. We pissed off a lot of customers.”

Not, perhaps, the language he might use in polite company, but it doesn’t half tell it like it is. And I’d imagine that anyone who’d had an unhappy experience in the Birmingham store would greatly appreciate a bit of plain speaking. But plain speaking is to hype what garlic is to vampires. I enjoyed (in a masochistic sort of way) the questionnaire on a Virgin train which came with the menu. It assured me, as these things invariably do, that Virgin was “constantly seeking” to improve the service. The reason the company wanted my “feedback” was “so that we can ensure that we are meeting your needs, and exceeding your expectations”.

Do people who write this stuff ever read their own words? If they are “constantly seeking to exceed my expectations” we’re going to find ourselves in a gastronomic race in which they’ll soon be having to serve me larks’ tongues in aspic to stop me suing them for false trading. But even in the midst of such mindless hype, language can bring us down to reality with a thud. The menu itself was “ ...recommended for customers on shorter journeys, and for those who do not want to be interrupted as all components will be delivered at the same time”.

“Components”? What ever happened to courses? We’re back in the world of “product”. But let’s be charitable - if not sympathetic. After all, the menu was signed by the managing director, one Charles Belcher. You think he eats his own “components” too quickly?

Yet it is reassuring to know that all these hotshot executives feel so close to their customers. A letter I received from BT was signed “Kind regards”. True, it wasn’t actually addressed to me (or anyone else for that matter) but it’s the thought that counts. And it’s good that they are so “committed”. That’s another favourite hype word. This letter began: “At BT, we are committed to providing great value for all our customers, by constantly developing innovative new products and delivering high quality services.”

“Great value” eh? Sounds good. A few quid off the next bill never comes amiss. But here’s how my new friend at BT went on: “To continue to do this, it’s occasionally necessary to raise some of our prices a little.”

Ah, I see. “Great value” in this Lewis Carroll world means higher prices. But what about these “innovative new products”? I assumed that in the fast-moving world of telecoms that meant at least, say, better phones with batteries that last longer or little headsets you can wear when you’re wandering around the house chatting on your cordless phone. But this is really what they mean: “Customers on BT Together Option 2 or 3 can now benefit from savings. By signing up to a 12-month contract, you save ₤33 (₤5.50 a month - that’s half the price of BT Together Option 1 line rental ₤11**). So you pay only ₤11** for Option 2 (usually ₤16.50**), or ₤20** for Option 3 (usually ₤25.50**), for the first six months.”

I’ll spare you the detail of the asterisks just as I spared myself. It is entirely possible that, buried somewhere in that impenetrable paragraph, is a deal that really would “meet my needs”. But I shall never find out because life is simply too short to spend precious hours trying to work it out. Sooner or later one loses the will to live.

Most of the time hype is merely irritating. It becomes intolerable when it collides with reality. If I sound a little irritated with BT it’s because it has been making my life a misery over the past few months with a display of technical failure which means I am regularly cut off from the outside world as surely as if the North Koreans had tested their latest device in my garden.

It’s not as if it hasn’t tried to provide me with the service for which I’ve been paying. Indeed, if their engineers spend any more time in my house the neighbours will start talking. But it has failed - and if you believed the hype you would have to believe it never fails.

I have a dream. A dream in which all the big companies with whom we do business abandon their idiotic “mission statements” and overblown, meaningless, jargon-laden hype masquerading as English, and deliver their messages in plain, simple, honest language. Something like this perhaps: “We’re going to do our damnedest to provide you with the best goods and services possible. We’ll make our pricing structure simple. We won’t make promises we can’t keep and if we do cock things up we’ll make amends.”

Good, plain, simple, honest, unambiguous language. Even the pedants might approve. I wonder if it will ever catch on.

John Humphrys is the author of “Beyond Words: How Language Reveals the Way We Live Now” (Hodder & Stoughton, ₤9.99).