When I'm ruler of the world — something which is, by the way, on my list of retirement projects, but keeps getting usurped by urgent tasks like booking an MOT for my mum's car, so I haven't got around to it yet — one of my first actions will be to ban the phrase 'up to' from all marketing materials.

Last year, I complained here about our bathroom cleaner, which announced that it removes 'up to 100% of bathroom grime and limescale', presumably to avoid disappointment for customers who thought it might remove 120% of either. It might actually only remove 80%, but that's fine, because they said 'up to', and it's still clearly a superior product to any competitor which did the same but only claimed to remove up to 90%.

Then a week or two ago, I was sent something that said, if I remember correctly, "Did you know your toilet could be costing you up to £581?" Well, I did, because it might be leaking through the floor, one drip at a time, into the dining room below and the water could seep from there into the secret trunk full of lost Gainsborough paintings that I have hidden below the floorboards. Oh, but, wait... then, it would be costing me much more than £581. So, no, I didn't know it could only be costing me up to £581. Perhaps I was the target market for this advertisement after all.

So I read a little bit further, where I discovered that what they meant (but hadn't said clearly) was £581 per year, but they made no mention of damaged masterpieces, and were really talking to people about the water bill incurred if their WC had a perpetual leak from the cistern into the bowl... people who presumably had previously assumed that this could only be costing them up to £580 per year!

So what I want to know is who came up with the precise £581 figure, and how they could be confident that the cost could never be, say, £600? I couldn't find the notice just now, and, doing a Google search for similar warnings, I discover pages stating that my loo could be costing me up to £200 per year, or up to as much as £1000. But, of course, it could be costing me 5p per annum, and all of their claims would still be valid.

So do watch out for these dubious phrases, but you only need to be on your guard for the next eight months or so, because by the end of this year I shall be ruler of up to 100% of the entire globe.