The corruption of public language in Australia

In recent weeks I have re-read George Orwell’s ‘Politics of the English Language’ (1950), as well as read Don Watson’s Death Sentence (2003). The arguments of both writers are strikingly similar. Clarity and precision in language are essential. The plain language movement derives from Orwell. Watson (2003, 2004) argues that managerialism has corrupted public language. I understand managerialism to be the application of private sector management practices to the public sector and the preference for the free market. The language of business rather than the language of government is a feature of managerialism. While there needs to be a balance between clarity and precision on the one hand and personal taste on the other hand, I feel that managerialism has tipped the balance towards jargon and management clichés and away from clarity and precision.

Last week I consulted a style guide that omitted jargon, clichés, metaphors, and weasel words. While this omission is partly due to those who operate within a discipline not recognising that words specific to their discipline are incomprehensible to those outside it (like ‘governance’ or even ‘pedagogy’), it is important for me as a political scientist and an educator to understand how politicians use words and actions to obtain power. Part of our job as academics is to help fellow citizens decipher political spin. They need to see how John Howard, for instance, appropriated terms from the left such as ‘mateship’, ‘battler’ and ‘fair go’, and infused them with individualist ideology (Dyenforth 2007). It was ‘Howard’s rhetorical hegemony upon “Australian values” [that] contributed to his decade-long electoral success’ (Dyrenfurth 2007, p. 211) and to the collective desire to ignore inequality. Similarly, ‘benchmarking’, ‘core’ and ‘non-core promises’, and ‘key performance indicators’ are not going to provide citizens with better services because the language of business is not the language of government. Without clarity in language, the words of politicians might become words of mass destruction  (Watson 2003, 2004). Much of this analysis might be lost due to the growing number of academics who defer to jargon rather than to plain language. We do need to know the terms and concepts that structure knowledge in our disciplines, but we also need to communicate effectively with those outside our discipline.

References

Dyrenfurth, N. 2007. ‘John Howard’s Hegemony of Values: The Politics of ‘Mateship’ in the Howard Decade’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 42, 2.

Orwell. G. 1950. ‘Politics and the English Language.’ In Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. Great Britain: Secker and Warburg.

Watson, D. 2003. Death Sentence: The decay of public language. Sydney: Knopf.

Watson, D. 2004. Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Clichés, Cant & Management Jargon. Sydney: Vintage.