Another word that I've found extremely useful is the word 'padding'. I'm sure we're all familiar with those days at school when our essay was not quite long enough...so we employed padding - substanceless language - as a means of upping the word count.

Padding also occurs every day in ordinary conversation, for instance at the end of a telephone conversation when both parties deliberate for about five minutes on how nice it was talking to each other, when they'll speak again, whether they'll speak again, aren't clouds nice etc. Let's try and cut this out - think how much time is wasted when we could be talking about more interesting stuff!

Also, we tend to pad our lives quite a lot in other areas - doing things to pass the time. We should all make an effort to cut down on the padding in our lives. Maybe. Well, we could at least use the word more!