(FORTUNE Magazine) – Before the tidal wave of political correctness, nothing can stand--not even a "Chinese Wall." Yes, the favored phrase of barristers and bankers looking to rationalize conflicts of interest (as in "It doesn't matter that we also represent your archcompetitor; we'll put up a Chinese Wall between their team and your team") has become distinctly un-PC and is on its way to RIP.

The term, which draws its inspiration from the Great Wall of China, describes a purportedly impenetrable barrier in the flow of information within a law firm or investment banking house. On Wall Street, it's what (usually) helps keep an individual house's traders from making illicit profits on inside information available to the firm's investment bankers. (The Great Wall has inspired those of artistic, as well as mercenary, temperament: popster Phil Collins produced a 1984 album for Earth, Wind & Fire vocalist Philip Bailey titled Chinese Wall; Swiss writer Max Frisch penned a play titled Die Chinesiesche Mauer, a hit of the 1946 Zurich theater season.)

But the phrase seems on its way out in the fastidious world of American business. "It's been around for a long time," says Alfred Youngwood, a partner who serves as chairman of the committee on committees at the New York-based law firm Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison. "But people are sensitive today, and use it less." The fall of "Chinese Wall" has left lawyers and bankers laboring with prosaic language: They now speak of an "ethics wall." McGlinchey Stafford, a New Orleans firm, has embraced a new bit of less objectionable--and far less evocative--jargon, says Rudy Cerone, an attorney there. when it runs into problems, it activates an "information-blocking system." It's enough to make you welsh on that political correctness.

--Peter Elkind