Language Matters

Managerial language. Mid-management words. Attrition=killing and Downsizing=firing and on it goes. Sludge, clag, and gruel marks the quality of public language today. Say what you mean and mean what you say no longer works in the 21st century. We say what we don't mean and don't mean what we say. Samuel Johnson called it cant. If this is (fair & balanced) disgust, so be it.

[x The Age]
Fighting the death sentence
by Don Watson

People were rocking with laughter; some were in tears. Deadpan, Don Watson waited. One audience member said later it was the funniest dinner of academic deans he had ever attended. But Watson was not joking. He was reading from a university mission statement and other material on its website.

"To provide outcome-related research and consultancy services that address real-world issues" - shrieks of laughter. The university's "approach to quality management is underpinned by a strong commitment to continuous improvement and a whole-of-organisation framework" - uproar in the room.

The university in question was RMIT but it could have been any of them. Go to your website and read the language, Watson urged guests at a recent Deans of Education dinner. That made people laugh even more. They worked at universities; they knew what he was talking about. Some of them probably even wrote this stuff. It was a surreal moment.

But to Watson the joke has a sting. It is funny and it is awful. A terrible thing is happening to the language, he believes, and at the end of the day, in a globalised world, it is not a positive communications outcome. In other words, there is a pox upon our public speech.

In 1992 Watson, a historian and writer, went to Canberra to write speeches for Paul Keating. He saw the prime minister up close and it inspired his award-winning biography, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. But he saw something else, too, and it has provoked a new book - Death Sentence, The Decay of Public Language.

The book charts how "managerial language" has infiltrated the English of politics, business, bureaucracy, education and the arts. The book is about the rise of core strategies and key performance indicators, and the death of clarity and irony and funny old things called verbs. It is about a new language that Watson calls sludge and clag and gruel. Those three blunt words speak to the book's larger intention. Death Sentence is also a manifesto, the first shots, Watson hopes, in a campaign everyone can join to bring the language back to life.

And so down the margins runs a series of quotes - Watson's take on how bad, and how good, the language can be. Tim Fischer is lined up beside the Book of Job, Vladimir Nabokov beside the Victorian Government: "The Facilities Enhancement Project aims to maintain and further develop the facilities and services of the Puffing Billy Railway as a significant world-class . . ."

And on, and on. Perhaps this is unfair. No one expects report writers to sound like James Joyce, though it might be nice if they sounded less like a character in Kafka. But Death Sentence is a polemic, not a strategy report inclusive of all stakeholders.

Nor is it, Watson stresses, born of a wish to keep the language static. The genius of English is the way it updates itself every day, with 20,000 new words a year, Watson read somewhere.

And the new is often rich. He loves the word "cool", with its irony and nuance. He is delighted when a young couple stops in the park to stroke his dog and one says, "Jeez, his fur is soft as". Better that, he says, than some tired old simile.

"Language is what gives me greatest pleasure," he says. "I can't laugh without it." Yet in the depleted new language "you can't tell a joke".

"It's incapable of carrying an emotion. It is the language equivalent of the assembly line. It turns human processes into mechanical ones."

Is this new? Dictators and lawyers and priests have long used arcane speech to maintain authority. But something else is happening, Watson says - and that is the way everyone is busting to speak like a middle manager.

Social democrats try to sound like corporate executives, with objectives and strategies and commitments ("Some of the Bracks Government stuff is appalling," says Watson). Meanwhile, business people try to sound like social democrats, committed to social capital and the triple bottom line. And because corporations have no familiarity with the old language of justice and struggle it sounds hollow and dead in their mouths, whether it is or not.

"Friends, Romans, customers" - Watson writes, putting the modern benchmark on the world-best implementer of language. Which organisation, he asks, now claims in its mission statement to have "a deep commitment to the customer"? Safeway? McDonald's? No, the CIA.

Even football is infected, he laments. Players must be accountable, stick to the game plan, provide flexibility on the forward line, going forwards. "What we are losing is language expressing character or imagination, which interests one human being in another, and from which the game's spirit springs."

But here is the rub. As widespread as this newspeak is, it is almost impossible to find someone who will admit to writing it. The email print-out Watson pushes across the table contains another monster quote, this time from a report by a government-funded arts body. "Our poor project officer has to put all this crap in a document," wrote the mole inside the organisation who smuggled it out to Watson. "A Bex and a good lie down is needed all around."

"There is concern about it everywhere," Watson says. For the past month or so he has spoken in public on the subject. "People always laugh like buggery when you speak it. They begin to get hysterical." And they also say: "We write it (reports) as best we can and we're told, 'Put it into dot points'." If this writing expresses the dominant ideology of the day, it is remarkable how few people want to own it.

Which brings us back to Watson's time in Canberra. Every week, he says, jargon-laden public service reports would hit his desk. From this Watson had to conjure words for his boss that would inform and even inspire the people. Sometimes he slipped, too. "I'm sure if I went through the speeches I wrote I would find a horrifying number of phrases of the kind I loathe, especially on economics. But I was conscious, when I got a document from the department, of always trying to unpick the prose and make it live."

One day he outlined a plan to a senior public servant, Sandy Hollway. Why not get a few writers - not Patrick White, just respectable journeymen - and run courses teaching public servants how to write? "You'd fill auditoriums," Hollway replied, confirming Watson's hunch that there was a huge appetite for change. But why has this language emerged? It is a hard question and the slender book - which Watson sees as an opening of the argument rather than the last word, does not entirely answer it.

One influence is "the pursuit of business models in places that were never businesses".

"Universities that once valued and defended culture have swallowed the creed whole. Libraries, galleries and museums, banks and welfare agencies now parrot it. The public sector spouts it as loudly as the private does."

Nevertheless, Watson also partially sympathises. He thinks that because modern business and politics force people to make difficult decisions quickly they prefer not to be too precise - they may have to retract them later. When journalists want instant answers to complex matters, important-sounding waffle might feel like the safest way to go.

Critically, says Watson, the new language is infected by marketing, and so "there's a kind of overclaiming in it". At times, it "sounds like nothing so much as communist doctrine". It is a fine line, he suggests, between continuous improvement going forward and "the 77th tractor brigade salutes the glorious victories of the five-year plan".

That does not necessarily mean Watson sees a new totalitarianism on the way. One subtlety of Death Sentence is the way Watson wrestles with the weight of his subject. An ugly word is not a crime against humanity, he writes. Perhaps it is even all for the best. Perhaps public language is decaying because in the West the grand narratives of struggle and war are dying, and is that not to the good? Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, after all, followed a hideous civil war.

But Watson does not entertain the thought for long. Why, he wonders, has not one memorable sentence emerged from our leaders after September 11 and Bali? How could John Howard talk about "the end of innocence" after September 11 and not have journalists hammer him? "Australia innocent?" he writes. "It can only be fantasy, ignorance or mischief. Or a cliche which, having lost its meaning through overuse, can be anything you want to make of it . . . It does not help us understand a tragedy but rather diminishes it."

That might be what worries Watson most - the loss of sensation and sympathy that the new speech creates. A corporation "downsizes" its staff, an army achieves "attrition" of the enemy. People are losing their jobs or their lives.

What is to be done? Watson suggests, first, that people and organisations put a moratorium on certain words and phrases. He says this will force people to rediscover words that have fallen into disuse. Organisations can set targets for expunging words or rediscovering them. The best weapon, says Watson, is laughter. People should turn their backs, tap their pens, put their handkerchief on their heads when they hear it. He thinks it is not too late but "it is important to satirise it as quickly as possible".

"Such wisdom as we have we express in language, and in language we also seek it," he writes. He quotes George Orwell, who was on to this problem 60 years ago. "Language becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

The faith of Death Sentence is a sentence of two words: Language matters. Bear in mind, Watson writes, "that if we deface the War Memorial or rampage through St Paul's with a sledgehammer we will be locked up as criminals or lunatics . . . Yet every day we vandalise the language, which is the foundation, the frame, the joinery of the culture, if not its greatest glory, and there is no penalty and no way to impose one. We can only be indignant. And we should resist."

© 2003 The Age Company Ltd