And while certainly nothing new, the art of dodging plain English when it comes to describing mass firings continues to advance, so to speak, as the ongoing economic crisis piles mass firings one on top of another. For example, here's a headline on a press release forwarded to me this week: "Nokia Siemens Networks enters final stage of synergy-related headcount restructuring."

"Hi, honey, I'm afraid I have bad news: I've been synergy-related headcount restructured."

A tone-deaf public relations department even went so far as to put the mealy-mouthed words on the lips of company CEO Simon Beresford-Wylie: "With the successful completion of these plans, we will have the vast majority of the synergy-related headcount reductions completed and we can then start to put this chapter of our history behind us and focus on creating a world-class company."

A world-class company might start by referring to 3,000 individuals about to become unemployed as people instead of "headcount," and their company-issued trauma as a business decision instead of an inalienable force of nature.

After reading the Nokia Siemens release, I set off searching for other recent examples of companies resorting to euphemism instead of calling layoffs simply layoffs. That didn't take long because the first item I found via a search was a story by magazine writer Yi-Wyn Yen, who had the same idea only sooner.