In the flavor of banning overused words, Raymond Chen banned several words and Brendan declared a moratorium on “story”, I am going to throw my own recommendation into the ring.

I hereby declare a ban on the use of the word “leverage.”

Examples of bad usage:

“Our product leverages Active Directory to authenticate users.”

“Leveraged an existing infrastructure to accelerate development time and improve quality.”

So what do these really mean?  The first quote means “We make modifications to your enterprise's Active Directory schema in order to jerry-rig AD to work similar to LDAP because we needed a Microsoft-centric product offering for our investors.”  In case you couldn’t tell, this is very BAD.  I won’t say what product this is, but it is a very large and expensive business intelligence product whose name sounds kind of like “Dogmos”.

The second means “We used stuff that was already there to meet your insane schedule demands, you pompous prick.”  Yeah, I said this one.  But see how much better it sounds when you say leverage?