Are analysts sent to a special school to learn how to mangle the English language? Are their clients impressed by their insistence on making simple things sound complicated?

Here's yesterday's note on Next from the retail team at HSBC, with a running translation.

"The sector bounce is an opportunity to re-evaluate positions" (shares have gone up a bit, we think you should sell). "With economics newsflow continuing to deteriorate" (there's more bad news on the economy coming), "we think it is prudent to assume difficult trading conditions in UK clothing" (no one is selling much of anything). "Encouraged by the company's pre-close update, we have taken the opportunity to cut our forecasts further" (sell the shares), "this leaves the shares looking like a very dull Neutral (sell the shares)."

Flavio's party line: keep out

In Sardinia, he has unveiled a new restaurant near his club for the super-rich, Billionaire. The new place has been built so that luxury yachts can be moored while those on board gorge themselves before setting sail again.

The locals, however, fed up at having Briatore and his pals flaunt their wealth, have had enough. The launch party was disrupted by a crowd from the nearby beach pelting them with buckets of water and sand.

Briatore's response? "This year we are opening the restaurant, but from next year we will manage the beach as well."

* As is well-known, this is a government keen to promote recycling. That surely must be the reason for John Hutton's promise, made amid much fanfare in the Financial Times, to cut red tape - well, not quite, only to introduce new regulations if they replace old ones. This idea was flagged three months ago by William Hague for the Tories and has now been grabbed by the Business Secretary.

Losers can be winners, Fred

Brian Pitman outlived that red ink moment and went on to a knighthood and the chairmanship of Lloyds. Now he sits on the boards of Tomkins, Singapore Airlines and Carphone Warehouse as well as being a senior adviser to Morgan Stanley.

He managed to create a bit of a stir with investors last month when as head of the remuneration committee at Carphone he bunged chairman John Gildersleeve a 57% pay rise. And earlier this year, Pitman - 76 but always up for a challenge - popped up in our country's hour of need, heading Sir Richard Branson's attempt to snaffle Northern Rock.

Fred, it's all before you.

* BP's Russian oligarch bête noire, Mikhail Fridman, appears to be rather slow in updating his CV.

According to the Alfa Group website and faithfully repeated by his London PR advisers Financial Dynamics and his lawyers, Lovells, he is "a member of Russia's Public Chamber", a partly elected, partly Putin-appointed advisory body to the Russian government.

Not so. Fridman was dropped from the board in October 2007. Some analysts at the time saw this as a sign of Putin's growing estrangement from the billionaire (current wealth estimated at a modest £10.5 billion).

* Further evidence of Americans' irony-free diet. In Britain, Philip Delves Broughton's new book recounting his time on America's most famous MBA course is called What They Teach You at Harvard Business School - a simple play on the late Mark McCormack's What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School. Across the Pond, however, PDB's book drops with a dull thud as Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School.

* Crispin Odey comes in for congratulation in The Daily Telegraph. Writing from Nice (where else?), ex-LSE member John Fordyce, hails the hedge-fund manager's profits of £55.3 million. "That is some achievement," eulogises Fordyce. "The mind boggles at the sheer size of the 'short' position."

He adds: "As they say in France, 'chapeau.'" City Spy wonders whether the under-siege managements of HBOS and Bradford & Bingley also feel like doffing their caps in the direction of Odey?

Playing their cards right over sex pest

Shearman points out that the event was not organised by the firm.

It also says - and City Spy would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the firm put its sharpest legal minds together to come up with this one - that the credit card used by the associate to pay the entrance fee was not a corporate card but a private one branded with the firm's logo...

* In The Lawyer, a reader puts the Shearman episode into perspective: "This has happened for years and years. Associates always hit on the vac scheme students, and in my experience plenty of vac schemers like bagging associates. Not that this excuses this incident, but it's an extreme example of what goes on every summer."

* City Spy's interest in our UK special envoy for trade and investment, otherwise known as Prince Andrew, has prompted a reader to recount the time the Duke and Duchess of York paid a visit to our embassy in Oman. When they arrived, someone from their party was heard to utter the words: "Right! What gifts are there for us then?"

* Wow, that is going some. Greg Coffey, the soon-to-leave GLG superstar hedge fund manager looks after the firm's $5 billion emerging markets fund. In May, reports Financial News, he turned it over 56 times. On average, he changed his portfolio 2.8 times daily. In all, he traded $254.6 billion on emerging markets in May, ending the month up 5.1%.

* From Bob Dylan's Radio 2 show, his view on the prospect of the downloading phenomenon making the music industry worthless: "It wasn't worth nuthin' anyway."