Meet Don Watson, onetime speech writer for, and adviser to, former Prime Minister Paul Keating. In recent years he has turned his hand to writing a couple of books about what he sees as a trend to steal the soul and the spirit from our language through the explosion of bureaucratic and "officialese" language dogging almost every conceivable kind of public written communication these days, from government websites to corporate press releases.
At the time when the first of these books, Death Sentence, was published, Don Watson gave this interview about it to broadsheet newspaper The Age in Melbourne.
His second book on the subject, Weasel Words, has inspired an entire active website on the subject.Here's something to think about: whether this process is a conscious one or not, who might be seen as standing to gain from these changes to the language? Might they then be deliberately seeking to steer the English language towards a kind of "Newspeak"? After all, language is power.
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