Almost 65 years ago, my school class was instructed to write a short essay on “A Day at the Zoo”. I knew a zoo was a place full of animals, but I’d never set foot in one. And I’ve always lacked imagination. I wrote nothing. Why not, asked the teacher? “Couldn’t think of anything, Sir,” I mumbled. “Well,” he said, “try harder next time. But OK, if you can’t think, don’t write.”

That is sound advice, but it would kill some side-branches of journalism. There are some fine women columnists, others whose columns see print only because they are women. These would vanish, not before time. And much fashion and lifestyle journalism in British or American media plainly comes from writers who reckon words are a substitute for having something to say.

This sort of writing has its own jargon. There’s nothing wrong with jargon, in its place: that is, addressed, in the right context, to people who will understand it. Used thus, it’s a valuable short way of expressing complex concepts. Most readers of a financial journal will know what it means by, say, disintermediation (no, don’t ask, I’ve forgotten too). A sports journo can write that so-and-so was lbw, without having to explain the laws of cricket. The verbal technicalities of women’s fashion are a mystery to me, but fair enough, they’re seldom aimed at men.

But there’s another sort of jargon which may mean something to its writers but only to a tiny minority of its readers. The archetype of this is the wine writing to be found in most upmarket Anglo-American papers. This has lost some of its past snobbery, but not its absurdity.

Here is one London weekly’s expert. One wine delivers fat, chunky, chocolatey, briary spice. Another has ripe, silky, leafy, briary fruit. A third is crisp, crunchy, verdant. OK, spice and fruit are technical terms, and she’s trying to tell us how the wines taste or smell. But tell us what? How can any quality of a watery liquid be fat or chunky? What do briars — rose briars? brambles? — taste or smell of? In what way is any liquid crisp or crunchy?

I can offer no answers whatsoever. If she says chocolatey or even (I quote) brown-bread-scented, I’m ready to believe that her educated nose and palate, and those of maybe one in 500 of her readers, can spot and identify real scents and flavours that my untrained organs cannot. But what of the adjectives I’ve made mock of earlier? I presume they mean something to her. I will generously allow that they may, just, do so to a few of her fellow-experts. But even there I have doubts. And I don’t go even that far for the wine merchant who claims one wine has a supple texture and elegance — like a raw-silk shirt, maybe? — and another a moreish hint of vanilla. Oh yeah? Moreish? Gibberish. This sort of braindead winespeak might as well be Martian for any normal human.

That doesn’t prove its writers haven’t thought — maybe they think deeply, in Martian. But one can well wonder. As one can about the expert cook who applied similar gibberish, in the same weekly, to, if you please, a brand of honey. There is a bucolic background buzz, she wrote. You mean like a cow mooing? The hum of bees’ wings? In the background, that is.

Oh, come off it. My old school-teacher didn’t go far enough: if you can think something up, but it means nothing, don’t write it.