NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Money-losing Lucent isn't just burning through its cash as it waits and hopes for an eventual recovery in telecom -- it's burning through its euphemisms as well.

Lucent unsettled its already thoroughly unsettled investors again Thursday morning with yet another warning -- saying that revenues for the third quarter could decline as much as 15 percent from the second quarter, which would be about 15 percent worse than what the company had been projecting (see more).

The company, which has been losing money for the past eight quarters, saw its battered shares knocked down another peg; after recovering from steep losses early in the day, Lucent (LU: down $0.15 to $2.80, Research, Estimates) shares ended the day down 5 percent, changing hands for a whopping $2.80 a share.

In the deliberately bland press release announcing the bad news, Lucent blamed its poor prospects on what it variously, and euphemistically, termed "continuing market softness," "current market conditions," "market uncertainty," and "an uncertain market."

I know the folks at Lucent are trying to save money and everything, but couldn't they at least spring for a thesaurus?

The reason for all this, er, "uncertainty" is the virtual certainty that Lucent's cash-strapped telecom customers will do anything and everything in their power to avoid spending any money on Lucent gear. "Service providers continue to constrain their capital spending to conserve cash," Lucent CEO Pat Russo acknowledged vaguely in the press release, "which is clearly affecting our top line."

That's putting it mildly: Telecoms like Worldcom and Qwest (Lucent's customers), struggling mightily to keep from drowning in debt, have sliced their capital expenditures in half this year, and may well cut more.

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Indeed, in May Ciena (like Lucent, a telecom equipment company) said it was seeing customers resort to "extreme measures to conserve cash." Ciena CEO Gary Smith told analysts at the time that he thought current spending levels were "unsustainably low." Maybe. But at the moment, many of Lucent and Ciena's biggest customers can barely sustain themselves, much less the networkers who once grew fat on their capital expenditures.

While Lucent's resort to euphemistic language is at least understandable, it's a little harder to justify the lingering optimism in the company's future projections. While declining to get into specifics -- due, naturally, to "current market conditions" -- Lucent said it still "expects sequential improvement in the bottom line" in the third quarter, and that the company "continues to target a return to profitability and positive cash flow during fiscal 2003."

Yeah, and I "continue to target" winning the lottery.

Sure Lucent may finally deliver. But it's hard not to be a little cynical about Lucent's vague promises. As recently as this March, the company was promising it would return to profitability this year, not next. We'll just have to see how long Lucent's current certainties stand up to the "market uncertainties" of this "uncertain market."

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