PARIS— "What barnacular song do the puddering sirens sing, to lure the writer into the land of jargantua?"

Invited by the British Treasury to do something about the lax standards of official English in the 1950s, the grammarian Sir Ernest Gowers thus mocked the average civil servant's propensity to invent words, to use a long one when a short one would do, and to use 10 words when three would be enough.

Sir Ernest should have seen some of the current crop of modern business books. They groan with what H.G. Wells's Mr. Polly called "sesquippledan verboojuice," making no concession to style and little to syntax.

Frequently, they are written - it would often be more accurate to describe them as boilerplated together in committee-speak - by teams of two, three or more. Judge from the following examples, taken at random from some current guru-tomes:

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"Core competencies are not just another way of describing vertical integration."

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"Differences in value creation insights and parenting characteristics are reflected in different criteria for heartland businesses."

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"Leaders need to take their businesses ahead of prosumerism [sic] and the process-cost curve."

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"Our idea is that, eventually, within any holon [sic] in the holonic network, all support and management processes will be outsourced."

No wonder that one company, Executive Book Summaries of Bristol, Vermont, makes a living by selling eight- page summaries of the top business books, revealing the ideas, if any, without the flab.

The company receives more than 1,200 books a year, and Jeff Olson, one of the company's three editors, acknowledged that the staff had problems staying awake some afternoons as it culled this overabundance for insights. "We drink a lot of coffee," he said.

Executive Book Summaries selects 30 books a year to summarize and about 120 to review.

What makes a good business book? "It must be immediately useful," Mr. Olson said. "And we are always looking for something new."

His favorite business writer is Peter Drucker, but not many come up to this standard. His main dislikes are the uneven quality of the writing in books done by committees, the lobotomized quality of much academic prose and the fact that many books come from the publishers "almost completely unedited."

If reading the average business book makes you believe that business schools ought to teach more creative writing and less creative accounting, here is one that, for a change, is well enough written to be enjoyable. "Prophet of Management," a collection of the writings of Mary Parker Follett, comes courtesy of the Harvard Business School Press.

Mrs. Follett, who died in 1933, brought the brisk directness of an old- fashioned school principal to business writing. One feels instinctively that she would have despised a holon or a prosumer as much as a split infinitive and would have raised the eyebrows behind her wire-rimmed spectacles at some of the random polysyllables that pass for English in many business books today. She had high ideals for industry and commerce, and these included style, elegance and good expression.

"I see no reason why businessmen should have lower ideals than artists or professional men," she said. "Let us, indeed, do everything possible to make business management a profession, but while we are doing it, I think we may feel that businessmen can make as large a contribution to professional ideas as the so-called learned professions."

How holonic!