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 58
... sounds like he's reading the news . That may depend on the ears of those who hear him , or the news they listen to ; but it is certainly true that some politicians imitate their questioners so faithfully they sound like trainee TV news ...
... sounds like he's reading the news . That may depend on the ears of those who hear him , or the news they listen to ; but it is certainly true that some politicians imitate their questioners so faithfully they sound like trainee TV news ...
Page 62
... sound - bites grow ever shorter and more tendentious , even if this also means they are misleading , inadequate or silly . TV news adopts a strange sentence structure to accompany images . It is , after all , a visual medium . When the ...
... sound - bites grow ever shorter and more tendentious , even if this also means they are misleading , inadequate or silly . TV news adopts a strange sentence structure to accompany images . It is , after all , a visual medium . When the ...
Page 101
... sound of ordinariness is the message of common sense , which to a literal mind means the sense of common people ... sounds . This is a convenient approach to political language and common in democracies . There is nothing I had seen ...
... sound of ordinariness is the message of common sense , which to a literal mind means the sense of common people ... sounds . This is a convenient approach to political language and common in democracies . There is nothing I had seen ...
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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