Death Sentence: The Decay of Public LanguagePart diatribe, part cool reflection on the state of Australia's public language, Don Watson's Death Sentence is scathing, funny and brilliant. ' ... in public life the language has never been held in less regard. It withers in the dungeons of the technocratic mind. It is butchered by the media. In politics it lacks all qualifications for the main game.' Almost sixty years ago, George Orwell described the decay of language and why this threatened democratic society. But compared to what we now endure, the public language of Orwell's day brimmed with life and truth. Today's corporations, government departments, news media, and, perhaps most dangerously, politicians u speak to each other and to us in cliched, impenetrable, lifeless sludge. Don Watson can bear it no longer. In Death Sentence, part diatribe, part cool reflection on the state of Australia's public language, he takes a blowtorch to the words u and their users u who kill joy, imagination and clarity. Scathing, funny and brilliant, Death Sentence is a small book of profound weight u and timeliness. |
From inside the book
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Page 12
... form with a fraction of the richness that living English has . Relative to the potential of language , the new form approximates a parrot's usage . It is cliché- ridden and lacks meaning , energy , imagery and rhythm . It also lacks ...
... form with a fraction of the richness that living English has . Relative to the potential of language , the new form approximates a parrot's usage . It is cliché- ridden and lacks meaning , energy , imagery and rhythm . It also lacks ...
Page 16
... form of massage or manipulation . You try surgery and when you've finished there's more on the floor than on the ... forms , it issues from the mouths of commanders of armies and leaders of nations , as if to say that in our advanced ...
... form of massage or manipulation . You try surgery and when you've finished there's more on the floor than on the ... forms , it issues from the mouths of commanders of armies and leaders of nations , as if to say that in our advanced ...
Page 162
... forms , fea- tures and structures shape meanings in a variety of textual forms as the current New South Wales English syllabus describes contemporary requirements . Our teachers still believed in language . A text was still an ...
... forms , fea- tures and structures shape meanings in a variety of textual forms as the current New South Wales English syllabus describes contemporary requirements . Our teachers still believed in language . A text was still an ...
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Common terms and phrases
Advance Australia Fair American argument Australian better Burke Bush buzz word clichés commitment communications context continuous improvement core corporate culture customers Czeslaw Milosz dead democracy economic Elements of Style Elmore Leonard empowered English language enhanced evil Exercise feel Flaubert flexible following sentence football George Orwell George W grammar guage hear henhouse hope Hopefully human ideas imagination imitate implement inspiration issue John Howard journalists kind Knowledge Management leaders least less Lincoln live managerial marketing mateship means ment mind mission statements modern moral clarity never Norman Mailer numbers organisational outcome parrot Philip Roth phrases politicians President Primo Levi prioritised prose public language reason Rewrite the following rhetoric Shakespeare social someone sound speak speech strategy talk television tell thing thought Tim Fischer tion truth universities verbs W.H. Auden wonder write