Bad language
BUREAUCRATS, consultants and, let us not forget, our politicians have made an art form of weasel words.
Now this will come as no surprise to anyone who has sat through a seminar, conference, workshop or government department meeting.
What you may not know, though, is this bastardisation of the English language is not just a passing fad. If anything, it is becoming ‘standard practice’ in our manipulated world of information.
Author Don Watson, in his must-read book Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Clichés, Cant and Management Jargon, describes weasel words as “dead, depleted, verbless jargon”, or words without meaning or understanding.
Watson has compiled more than 700 examples of our language being brutalised, assaulted and driven to extinction. Many were provided by people frustrated, even angry, by this creeping decay.
You do not need to look far to find examples. Watson provides a lead: “It is there in the pompous lunacy of management jargon … to primary schools where children now use PowerPoint in English presentations and are taught to call the conclusions of their history essays product.”
Jargon is not new. It surfaced back in the late 19th century and has gathered pace ever since.
Your first cringe experience may have been one of the following: a line in the sand, rubber on the road, helicopter view, moving forward, cascading down, low hanging fruit, in this space … and so on, ad nauseam.
As the disease spread, we were forced to endure: a bucket of trust, work life balance, on the same song sheet, granularity, moving forward and moving forward into the future (two for the price of one!)
Today the buzzworders (sorry!) are excelling with behavioural accountabilities, empower yourself to look back at the big picture, big-step improvement (obviously better than a small step!) and journey of discovery (to where?).
The guilty are even stringing together complete sentences. Example: “Examining new performance measurement models that will be emerging to change the key deliverables of the finance professional in a new technology world.”
But this gibberish is not confined to conversation; it has weaselled its way into virtually every form of communication, from letters, memos and reports to political statements, presentations and advertising. (Social media, of course, is a dumping ground of gutted English.)
Take this recent local job advert: “You’ll work to achieve full integration of organisation competency frameworks with other management processes, clarifying the link between organisation and individual performance ... as well as facilitating performance appraisal, other performance management processes and operationalise competency models.”
If you have trouble understanding that, welcome to 99.5 per cent of the population.
Even Wikipedia has caught the bug.
It describes a weasel word as “an informal term for words and phrases aimed at creating an impression that a specific or meaningful statement has been made, when instead only a vague or ambiguous claim has actually been communicated”.
One of the last outposts against weasel words is journalism.
Young journalists constantly have drummed into them — less is better, more is confusing and a waste of space.
Watson’s book — a sequel to Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language — captures all that is irritating and soul destroying about the demise of the English language.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so distressing. Graeme Vincent is a former Geelong
Advertiser editor.