I was listening to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio current affairs program AM at the gym this morning.
One of the stories featured Don Watson, former speech writer for Paul Keating, all-around word curmudgeon and enemy of ‘weasel-words’. He was being interviewed about the use of ‘tiresome management speak’.
Interviewer Sabra Lane asked Watson for his opinion of the following recent quotes:
Lane: “Detailed programmatic specificity…”
Watson: “Detailed program, no, that is completely lost. There’s not even any meaning there for the person who wrote it.”
Lane: “I think there’s a large degree of consensus that we need to have an alternative framework to the non-existing framework which existed in the past. There is still some disagreements about the actual nature of the framework for the future.”
At this point Lane reveals the quotes are from Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Watson’s comments include the observation: “I think he really ought to see it as one of his responsibilities to use the language as it’s meant to be used. I mean he does understand language very well, he knows when and how to use it well, which makes it all the less forgivable that he uses it so tiresomely so often.”
Interestingly, if someone like George W. Bush had uttered the aforementioned quotes it would be splattered all over youtube as further inalienable proof of his lack of cogency and intelligence .
When Messrs Rudd or Obama make gaffes like this they are assumed to be intelligent men whose capacity for self expression is being either accidentally or intentionally clouded. As an Australian I hear far more of Rudd, who does pick some really odd ways to say things.
Watson observes: ‘No they just send us messages, and they call it spin, you know, which, look, if it was spin it would be fantastic, I wouldn’t mind it. Spin sort of suggests something mesmerising. This isn’t spin it’s anaesthetic. It’s like a big cloud of gas that comes over and makes cutting your toenails look interesting.’
Now that’s how you use language to communicate a message.
Here’s a link to the interview. There is a longer version of the interview on site.
It is well worth a listen. Watson has a passion for communication and nothing seems to frustrate him more than the primary means of communication (words) actually being used to frustrate communication.
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