Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language

By Don Watson, Sydney: Random House, 2003, hardback, $29.95. Reviewed by David Ritter in the March 2004 issue.

Help more readers find out about this article
Slashdot   Digg   StumbleUpon   Del.icio.us

Don Watson is an historian who has achieved national prominence beyond the usual boundaries of academia, first as a scriptwriter, then as the chief author of the speeches of the last Labor Prime Minister and, most recently, as the author of the elegiac Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM. Watson's new work, which has augmented his growing status as one of Australia's more prominent public intellectuals, is Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language,1 in which he floridly and vehemently argues that the idiom 'of political and business leaders and civil servants' in Australia is in a state of terrible decline (p. 1). In Watson's view civic language has generally become so poor that it is now largely 'incapable of carrying mood or emotion' (p. 48) and, because of its sterility and opacity, serves to enrage, depress, humiliate and confuse readers and listeners (p. 3). Repeatedly invoking the metaphor of mimicking parrots (pp. 9-10), Watson contends that public language is wracked by a veritable pandemic of jargon and cliché; empty code words which are 'learned, practised, expected [and] demanded' throughout the networks of the managerial classes in Australian society (p. 15).

Particular terms that annoy Watson are identified with abundant specificity in accusatory italics throughout the work: enhance (pp. 38-9;184-5), commitment (pp. 38-9; 50-51; 184), flexibility (pp. 41-42; 54) and outcome (pp. 56-7; 187) are, for example, all among the indicted vocabulary. According to Watson the impugned expressions, though apparently of common currency, are 'like minor deities or icons the true meaning of which has long been forgotten or never understood' (p. 97). Death Sentence contains numerous short extracts culled from sources such as government reports, conference blurbs and media transcripts, all arrayed in unflattering proximity to excerpts from the great and the classical. The juxtaposition of Turgenev with news reports from the Second Gulf War (p. 13), or of the 2nd Annual National Conference on Government Portals with Martin Luther King's address at the Lincoln Memorial (pp. 53-55) is brutal and hardly seems fair because apples are not being compared with apples. However, the contrast of the moribund and mediocre with the magnificent is not only absurdly funny, it bluntly illustrates that while language can be elevating and evocative, contemporary discourse is all too often 'depleted and impenetrable sludge' (p. 24).

Although it is written with levity, Death Sentence discloses deeply serious concerns: as Watson ironically suggests, 'a word is not a Weapon of Mass Destruction', but while the 'decay or near death of language is not life threatening', 'it can give us the reasons for unreasoning behaviour, including war and genocide' (p. 7 ; and see also p. 118). Watson clearly appreciates that if civic communication is reduced to the repetitive deployment of risk-free bunk, then debate is muted and anodyne. In contrast, '[c]lear, precise, active language is good for democracy and for society. (p. 178)' Death Sentence is thus 'an argument concerning liberty' (p. 3) and it is unsurprising that Watson's prose finds sharp focus on certain infamous contemporary affairs of state, including the politically affective dissembling associated with the 'children overboard' affair2 and the professed reasons behind the invasion of Iraq. Yet if Death Sentence is a timely jibe at a conniving, reactionary and arrogant Commonwealth Government, culpable figures within the Labor Party also do not escape severe censure (e.g. p. 37; 91-2; 136). Despite his 'true believer' credentials, Watson is far more concerned with the chasm between the elites and the governed than with mere partisan loyalties.

Besides the cynicism of contemporary politics, Watson suggests other structural sources of the festering state of public language, including the seepage of managerial lexicon in to 'places that were never businesses' (p. 13); the inroads of post-structuralism into the teaching of the canon (p. 160); the abandonment of traditional editions of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (pp. 174-176); certain general aspects of Australian national history (pp. 69-73) and the pervasiveness of information technology with its concomitant ideology (p. 24). Gloomily, though not without ambiguity, Watson muses that dead language 'may well be to the information age what the machine and the assembly line were to the industrial', by removing 'the need for thinking' (p. 8).

In the face of the multiple infections afflicting the language of public life Watson suspects that 'resistance is probably futile' (p. 8), but nevertheless counsels defiance rather than fatalistic acquiescence: 'they say deconfliction, we say Claptrap! Hogwash! And we say it every time.' We must 'mock them', Watson urges, and 'never stop mocking them' (p. 182). Death Sentence then, is both an inspiration and a marvellous resource of rhetoric for those who are prepared to heed Watson's call for principled heckling. Perhaps the best way to put the point in terms of the present context, is to note that Watson's communications strategy is truly a unique and innovative process tool for enhancing the practical functionality and capacity of any consultant or manager committed to the key task of adding value to the outputs of their nodal team or hub in delivering best-practice to their information customers and other stakeholders. (Clearly Microsoft does not agree with Don Watson: the 'grammar check' on my pc saw no problem with the nonsense sentence you have just read.) Don Watson is right: it is time to make a stand.

Notes
1 Knopf, Milsons Point (NSW), 2002.
2 Indeed Death Sentence should, ideally, be read in conjunction with D. Marr and M. Wilkinson, Dark Victory, Allen & Unwin, 2002 and, perhaps, A. Pegler, John Howard's Little Book of Truth, Hardie Grant Books, South Yarra, 2003.

Citation

• David Ritter. 'Review: Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language by Don Watson' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), March 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 30 July 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• '…in public life the language has never been held in less regard. It withers in the dungeons of the technocratic mind. It is butchered by the media. In politics it lacks all qualifications for the main game.' - Don Watson
  
  Almost sixty years ago, George Orwell described the decay of language and why this threatened democratic society. But compared to what we now endure, the public language of Orwell's day brimmed with life and truth. Today's corporations, government departments, news media, and, perhaps most dangerously, politicians -- speak to each other and to us in clichéd, impenetrable, lifeless sludge.
  
  Don Watson can bear it no longer. In Death Sentence, part diatribe, part cool reflection on the state of Australia's public language, he takes a blowtorch to the words -- and their users -- who kill joy, imagination and clarity. Scathing, funny and brilliant, Death Sentence is a small book of profound weight -- and timeliness.

Have You Also Read?

• Blacktown
  
  Shane Weaver, Milsons Point: Random House, 2004, 292 Pages, Paperback, $29.95
  Reviewed by Tony Smith in the October 2004 issue.
  
  In spring 2004, a Senate Committee reported on evidence gathered from adults whose childhoods were spent in the care of state and church institutions. The experiences of witnesses representing some 500,000 people were predominantly traumatic, lacking in love and often brutal. Without diminishing the suffering of those removed from their families, Blacktown reveals that life at home can also be devastating for trusting and vulnerable children. Few memoirs are written by individuals with backgrounds as depressing as Shane Weaver experienced in Sydney's outer west in the 1950s and 1960s. Autobiographies usually describe interesting but generally admirable lives. Despite the optimism in his ... read more.