We will never know how Eric the Red described his vocation, but I'll bet he said something like, "Me? I'm in the rape-and-pillage game." If he were around these days, the Norse raider would surely take a cue from business and say, "I'm increasing value."

Long ago, in a time lost to memory, the word "value" had meaning. It was a good, solid, lunchpail sort of word that summoned up images of ethics and worth. But now business has hijacked the term. Widget makers don't talk about making widgets; they "add value." Executives looking to justify risky decisions hold on to, like a talisman, the idea that they are "increasing shareholder value." Even realists who groan at euphemisms such as "preowned automobile" now add value and increase value without so much as a twinge of conscience.

The assumption seems to be that the phrases can cure whatever ails the stock price. But let's remember the history of panaceas: Electric belts were sold as cure-alls for virility problems in the last century.

Just set your Internet browser to search for "increasing shareholder value" and you'll quickly see how silly the situation has become. You'll be dragged, as if by drunken bloodhound, to unlikely Web sites such as one given over to plot summaries of the TV soap opera "Melrose Place." How did we get here? Because, before MP fans can read about "Jo, the swinging psychiatrist," or "Guido, the killer porn producer," they must pass a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer by the site's keeper. "A thousand apologies for the tardy update," he writes, "but both Keith and I have been busy increasing shareholder value." Click again, and you go skittering off to the site of a guy selling corporate fitness and exercise programs. His pitch? If physically fit workers cost their employer less in sick time than do unfit ones, these savings can be applied to (you guessed it!) "increasing shareholder value."

A kaleidoscope of corporations is proud to announce they have so maximized value that they can't help but talk about it. These include such nuts-and-bolts companies as Joy Mining Machinery, Dairy Brands New Zealand (now somehow rejiggering the value content of its milk), and Alltrista, whose roots are in home canning. Look closely, and you'll see companies "adding value" in contradictory ways: by issuing new stock or buying back old; by hiring gobs of employees or laying off bunches; by conglomerating or shedding businesses.

Even Canadian forest-products giant Domtar talks about value, despite having to acknowledge destroying some $120 million of it in the recent past. In the peculiar language sometimes adopted by business, Domtar said it hoped to go from a negative increase in value to a positive increase "based on controllable factors" (better than those uncontrollable ones).

On the fateful day when some poor fall guy at Sunbeam comes to justice for foisting discounted barbecue grills on retailers in December 1997, a move that eventually helped to get the chief executive dumped, he will surely place a briquette-stained hand over his heart. He will then implore the judge: "Honest, your Worship, you can send me to perdition if for one minute I thought I was doing anything other than increasing shareholder value."

It's not that adding value and increasing shareholder value are bad things. They're great things. It's just that the terms have lost all meaning. They don't help insiders think, and they don't help those outside a business understand what's going on inside. So let's send them off to the kind people at the Home for Decrepit Phrases.

If you're still attached to the phrases, let's put it this way: Which consultant would you feel has a better grasp of your business, the one who bases his presentation on adding value or the one who describes precisely how he's going to make you more efficient and improve your bottom line? Which executive would you follow into battle, the one who uses vagaries like "increasing shareholder value" and hides behind euphemisms like "business re-engineering" or the one who says he intends to gut his business because it is hopelessly out of touch and then goes about doing it?

A contributing editor at Fortune magazine, Alan Farnham writes about foie gras, private railroad cars, and the good life in general. For people he likes, he occasionally ghost-writes books. He can be reached at alanfarnham@erols.com.