Author and speech writer Don Watson fears the day we are literally lost for words.
The avid reader and lover of language’s latest book, Worst Words, traces the insidious creep of management-speak further and further into politics, education and all aspects of public life.
Watson said he does not bemoan language’s fluidity or gradual evolution, but is pained to see the loss of useful words, the hollowing out of language into a meaningless sea of verbless obfuscation.
“I’m not saying political language or the language of everyday life is anywhere near as bad as your average company document, but it’s debilitated by it just the same,” he said.
“People resort to the sort of abstraction at every turn, politicians now do it reflexively and I think we’re much the worse for it.”
Three-word slogans or notions such as a country’s ‘agility’ not only impoverish politics, Watson argues, but our ability to communicate or even hold a thought at all.
“It’s actually a language of control, whether you control through using slogans such as the last Prime Minister did ad nauseam or you use control within an organisation by saying everyone must ‘achieve buy-in’,” he said.
When Watson holds talks and reads out some of the more absurd examples from his book, there is a mix of amusement at the absurdity but nervousness at its familiarity.
“I never quite know whether to laugh or to despair. It is very funny, if you read this stuff out to an audience who use this everyday they will laugh their heads off, because a lot of it is patently absurd,” he said.
“On the other hand it’s sort of tragic. It’s how we know each other, through language. So if we speak to each other through abstractions we don’t know each other.
“You can’t run a democracy if you speak in clichés and platitudes and mantras and slogans and in silly abstractions.”
Bad political language
Watson says it is this infiltration into politics and education that is most concerning.
He notes management language has been enormously convenient to politicians keen to spread messages without truly engaging.
“Language has always been a manipulative tool and a tool of influence and control. But the thing about management language is that it deadens thought in ways that political rhetoric used not to,” he said.
“Politicians are looking for ways to deaden thought, they’re looking for the phrases that will carry the message in some sort of amorphous way without encouraging people to think too much.
“That’s why a phrase like ‘having a conversation with the Australian people’ is so hypocritical, you can’t have a conversation when you’re talking in messages and if you aim is to message people rather than to talk to them.”
Don Watson will launch Worst Words at a special Sun Bookshop wine and cheese event in the Sun Theatre Function Room from 7.30pm Wednesday, November 11.
