Don Watson of Australia has written a gem of a book with the clever title Death Sentences. The purpose of the book is revealed in the subtitle: "How Cliches, Weasel Words, and Management-Speak Are Strangling the Public Language." Although sympathetic to the premise of the book before having read a word of the text, I was completely won over in the Preface to the U.S. Edition. Referring to management jargon, Watson writes:

In this language the only thing left to a writer is to shuffle the phrases and experiment with verbs.... In time, I learned that this was the beauty of management jargon, the unbreakable code. Anyone could write it and, with a little practice, speak it, and just to write or speak the stuff was to prove you were professional: so professional that every underling who could not crack the code much imitate you. The miracle was that once you knew a dozen or so "key" or "core" terms, once you were "focused" on them, thought was scarcely necessary. In fact, writing like this was best done, and perhaps could only be done, without thinking at all.

Watson's disdain for management jargon may carry him away just a bit, as he offers this comparison to the language of law:

Law used to be the foundation of public language, but now management is. Legal language can be arcane, obscure, and pompous, but management language is much worse. There is a provenance to law that management lacks, and it is capable of elegance and force. The lawyer Abraham Lincoln will do for evidence of this. Legal language at least has its roots in the same ground as the language the rest of us speak. But management language is newfangled in root and branch and rarely sounds like anything but hokum.

Thank goodness for Lincoln! Though the need to reach back 150 years is not a strong endorsement of legal language, Watson is right about management jargon. I suppose he is just shooting fish in a barrel, but it needs to be said, and he says it well.

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