Death Sentences: How Clichés, Weasel Words, and Management-speak are Strangling Public LanguageA brilliant and scathing polemic about the sorry state of the English Language and what we canaand mustado about it. When was the last time you heard a politician use words that rang with truth and meaning? Do your eyes glaze over when you read a letter from your bank or insurance company addressing you as a "valued customer"? Does your mind shut down when your employer starts talking about "making a commitment going forward" or "enhancing your key competencies"? Are you enervated by "in terms of," irritated by "impactful," infuriated by "downsizing, rightsizing, decruiting," and "dejobbing"? Does business process "re-engineering" and "attriting" fail to give you "ramp-up"a"in terms of your personal lifestyle"? Todayas corporations, news media, education departmentsaand, perhaps most troubling, politiciansaspeak to us and to each other in clichA(c)d, impenetrable, lifeless babble. Toni Morrison has called it the adisabled and disablinga language of the powerful, aevacuated language, a and adead language.a Orwell called it aanesthetica language. In "Death Sentences," Don Watson takes up the fight against it: the pestilence of bullet points, the dearth of verbs, the buzzwords, the weasel words and cant, the Newspeak of a kind Orwell could not have imagined. Published in Australia in November 2003, "Death Sentences" gained a massive following among the legions of bright, sensitive people who Could Not Take It Anymore. More than a year later, it remains a national bestseller. |
