Manager-speak destroying the English language, says new book

by BEN SANDILANDS in Sydney


Don Watson says he wrote his bestseller Death Sentence after being horrified by the homework assignment given to his 11-year-old granddaughter.

"She told me she had to write 'a personal mission statement going forward, defining her core values in dot points and setting out her long-term goals'.

"I snapped," he says. The speechwriter of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating wrote Death Sentence in white-hot anger.

And, although the book has been studiously ignored by corporate, academic and political figures since its recent release, Watson's stardom on talkback radio and television shows has put English usage by corporations, politicians, educators and civil servants in the spotlight.

"I realised that the opaque and obscure language of globalised companies had insinuated itself so deeply into society that it was stealing the beauty of words from our children," Mr Watson says.

"At a barbecue I heard colleagues talking about securing 'strategic oversight of our children'.

"In the post-match interviews in the last football season, victorious coaches were no longer saying their boys 'played hard, done good', they were saying things like, 'we deployed sustained forward-looking strategic risk-taking', and even 'we played accountable football'.

"Next season I'm waiting for someone to talk about a team playing 'transparent' football.

"Now that might sound funny because of its pomposity. Yet everyday we are confronted with a debased, depleted sludge, in the media, among corporations, by teachers and academics and by cultural institutions.

"Our political and business leaders employ this new language and its store of cliches, jargon, platitudes and weasel words to hide or twist the truth.

"This new doctrinal public language is a dead language, devoid of lyric or comic possibility, incapable of emotion, complexity or nuance.

"It doesn't allow you to say, 'I love you' or 'I hate you' or to be honest.

"It doesn't allow you to enjoy the beauty of words, the subtleties of their associations, or to use their power to be creative, or descriptive or to explore ideas."

Mr Watson says managerial English is the language of the revolutionary cell, shutting down debate, compassion and innovation. "It is doctrinal in a way that surpasses even Orwellian English. What was the language style of Stalinism, China's Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge's Year Zero has been seized upon by globalised companies and public services.

His book traces modern "management English" to the rise of management theories and business school curriculums. He argues that it is infecting the way all English speakers communicate.

"Consultancy firms realised there is a massive amount of money to be made from teaching a whole new universal language to government and commerce," he says. "I think management consultants have been the plague rats of this scourge, spreading it to the far corners of the planet."

Mr Watson's examples of management English include a vogue for bland euphemism. What were "body bags" in the Vietnam War became "human remains pouches" in the Gulf War and are "transfer tubes" in the war on Iraq.

At a press conference with US Command, a reporter asked what had become of a major concentration of Saddam Hussein's presidential guard and was told by the military liaison officer they had been "attrited".

Pressed on what "attrited" meant, the officer said "pureed".

Mr Watson argues that the phrases now used in marketing are almost indistinguishable from those heard in locker room interviews and theatres of war.

"They speak of focusing on the delivery of outputs and matching decisions to strategic initiatives.

"We are turning English into a process rather than a language, and as Primo Levy and George Orwell and many great writers and thinkers have noted, words can be used to isolate, disenfranchise and control."

Mr Watson says that because management schools, universities and even high schools no longer confer pass marks or degrees on those who fail to learn "management" English, the core of the language is being killed.

Is it really that bad? "I don't think I'm exaggerating, even though history suggests we can relax because English has survived - even flourished - on everything that has been thrown at it.

"English is wondrous in its vitality. Yet as it grows it is depleting."

How would he stop the rot?

"You have to ensure that the curriculum for every child teaches them the beauty of words so well that they leave school unable to read letters from banks - or mission statements.

"If we don't immunise ourselves from this plague of public language we will get a world where every improvement in the technology of communication is defeated by the death of English."

Author's targets

John Howard: For "petty, mind-numbing ordinariness" and cliched appeals to mateship.

George W. Bush: For sounding like he is controlled like a ventriloquist.

An unnamed Aussie Rules coach: For saying "At the end of the day, the sun will still come up in the morning."

* Death Sentence, The Decay of Public Language, by Don Watson, is published by Random