Information Research Weblog

Our mutual friend, Frank Miller, sent my a very good book recently: 'Death sentence', by Don Watson (Knopf, 2003). Not a mystery, in spite of the title, but, as the subtitle indicates, an essay on "the decay of public language".

Don's thesis is that encroachment of managerialist language upon the public sphere is leading to a numbing of the language. The managerialist jargon of 'enhancements', 'going forward', 'customer-orientation', etc., etc. has leaked from business into government, local government and academia, with dreadful results. A gem from the Victoria State Government in Australia:

In defining our values, we have formed a range of acceptable and non-acceptable behaviours, which contribute to the success of implementation. Behaviours which indicate that we are complying with values and contra which indicate that we are not. For example, a key contra behaviour, that we are currently focusing on that was identified through our values, is employees displaying disrespectful behaviour towards clients and/or other staff members.... etc., etc., etc. apparently interminably.

Instead of, simply, "All staff are asked to behave with appropriate respect towards clients and colleagues."

Consider also this from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in Australia:

Funding for legal aid is increasingly meeting less of the demand, but allocating additional funds on a one-off basis without a specific reason may be seen as an admission by the Government that funding is insufficient.

What is it saying? "Funding for legal aid is insufficient, but we daren't admit it."

Watson calls this stuff, "turgid sludge" and he occasionally discovers examples from various documents on 'knowledge management' and notes:

Political correctness and its equally irritating twin, anti-political correctness; economic rationalism; dope-smoking; Knowledge Management - wherever cults exist the language inclines to the arcane or inscrutable.

Throughout the book there are examples in the page margin of the good and the bad, sometimes nicely contrasted:

From Penelope Lively we have:

"Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms"

and from the 2nd Annual Conference on Government Portals,

"Achieve a user-centric portal framework."

My favourite quotations include:

"They risk-taked all day." (AFL Coach)

"They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.'
The man replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
(Wallace Stevens)

"The trouble with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur." (attr. to G.W. Bush)

And from the author, paraphrased here, because I can't locate it readily in the text:

"Never in history have so many sensible human beings found it so difficult to say something simple."

Buy this book, read it carefully and you will understand, at least, the basis of some of my criticism of 'knowledge management' - the authors write in such appalling technological, turgid sludge. Pick the bones from the trash and you are left with very little that is worth bothering about. In addition, and more importantly, you will have more reasons for distrusting the language of politicians and organizational managers.

As a journal editor, one of my aims is that the papers in Information Research should be intelligible to all - that aim is not always achieved, but looking at the rest of the professional press I suspect I'm the last editor who actually edits :-) This book makes me even more determined to try to maintain standards.