Bad Language – Don Watson

Don Watson is one of Australia’s most distinguished writers and public speakers. In 1992 he became Paul Keating’s speech-writer and adviser and his best-selling account of those years, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: Paul Keating Prime Minister, won the Age Book of the Year and Non-Fiction Prizes, the Brisbane Courier Mail Book of the Year, the National Biography Award and the Australian Literary Studies Association’s Book of the Year.  In addition to regular books, articles and essays, in recent years he has also written feature films, including The Man Who Sued God, starring Billy Connolly and Judy Davis. Following the publication of his most recent book, Bendable Learnings – The Language of Management, Don Watson joined Susan Butler and David Malouf to address The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 27 January 2010.

BAD LANGUAGE

DON WATSON

Management’s language has evolved to fill management’s needs. It came in on the back of management theories which, though numerous and various, are all concerned with “the art of getting things done through people”. Innovation, marketing, logistics, profits – all these are material questions for management, but they all depend on the matter of people. Modern management has decided that to get the most out of people, an organisation must command loyalty to certain values and aims, participation in a common culture and employees who are all but reflective in dealing with demands of their work. Management theory is an ideology and, like other ideologies, it uses language to consolidate power and to direct and modify behaviour.

I can live with agreeance as opposed to agreement; or refute when they mean deny; or fulsome praise as if it’s something to be welcomed. I can put up with the infidelities of texting and twittering – I don’t like it, but I try to think of it as just part of an expanded vernacular. I still don’t like it. The same goes for errant apostrophes; I’m inclined to think, just drop them altogether and they won’t annoy us anymore. If Susan Butler, editor of the Macquarie Dictionary, wants to put agreeance in the dictionary, it doesn’t worry me at all. Well it does, but you won’t hear me saying so.

It’s very important in this word business not to look like a curmudgeon, to do it at home, where no one can hear you.  It’s very bad politics. You can be written off as a curmudgeon, an over sixty pain in the neck. So, I can live with agreeance and possessive apostrophes on apples’ and used car’s.

But up with this, I cannot put. This is from Centrelink:

Customer experience: a focus on planned consistent customer experiences that embody the Centrelink brand and lead to optimum outcomes in terms of customer contentment .

We’re talking about job seekers here, or people who used to be called “unemployed”. Now, unemployment is the very positive experience of job seeking. It’s rather like exploring, like gold mining. Then we have at Centrelink:

– improvements in customer circumstances reflecting desired policy outcomes.

It goes on, “There has been an engine room for innovation across our network” – can I remind you that this is a government organisation with an engine room in it – an engine room. Think of that. Again in relation to Centrelink, we read of the “Centrelink contact point for statistics”. This is from an internal memo sent to me by someone in there hiding behind a filing cabinet. It goes on: “The Centrelink Contact Point for Statistics, previously known as the Centrelink Knowledge Desk is now known as the Business Intelligence Front Door.” Now, Stalin said, “We shall decide what words mean and what they don’t.” But down at Centrelink, they’re doing it too. So you come in one morning, and you’re looking for a desk, but it turns out that it’s become a door.

I have millions and millions of examples of this sort of language. Here, for instance,

In our endeavour to achieve our strategic vision and mission at all levels, we refer of our mutual values that remain our first and prime reference at all times … The new brand activation platform revolves around a central, below the line experiential activity, that can be leveraged across channels.

That’s from a Scotch whiskey company in Scotland, which used to be one of the safe homes of the English language – and the Gaelic language. Here’s Peter Garrett saying, “That has always been the position at this point in time.”  If you’re not a fool already this stuff will make a fool of you.

Senator Nick Xenophon: “A step forward in terms of what the status quo has been.” The former Deputy Prime Minister, Mark Vaile, holds the record for using “in terms of” – four in one sentence on the radio. After two “in terms of”, you’re brain dead, and so is the person speaking.

“There are people who are in deficit in terms of their legal adherence” – that’s from an ABC television executive. Here’s somebody talking about “working in manufacturing, development and outcomes based industries”, which is interesting really, because you know schools are also “outcomes based”.  One might not think a school would have so much in common with an industry. And then we have – from the University of Bristol:

Ongoing parallel quality of work indicating that explicit consideration of personal values attached to potential outcomes, challenges women’s perceptions of the optimal decision and this may influence their resolve to achieve a vaginal birth.

No organisations have rolled over more thoroughly to the management than the universities.

We have Landcare – as if farmers now talk this way:

Caring for our country’s focus on strategic wealth in six national priorities. … [and] There are a number of outcomes for each national priority and targets have been identified for each outcome.

The farmers wonder – “Do I use a shovel”. And it goes on and on and round and round – targets, outcomes, priorities, in terms of, and very often nothing gets done.

This is a product safety recall:

What is the hazard? Potential choking. What is the safety risk? The two piece whistle component of these blow outs could become liberated, resulting in a choking hazard.

We would never use a word like “liberate” in talking about a thing you blow through to make a whistling noise, until now. But if you get out of the habit of using verbs, soon you don’t know a good one from a bad one.

Now, to get serious, we have George Orwell in 1943. Writing in his diary in between tending to his hens and counting his eggs, he mused:

Another government leaflet this morning on treatment of air raid casualties. The leaflets are getting much better, especially Duff Cooper’s, which in fact are ideal for anyone down to five pounds a week. But there is still nothing in really demotic speech, nothing that will move the poorer working class, or even be quite certainly intelligible. Most educated people don’t realise how little impression abstract words make on the average man.

How could Orwell know that a quarter of a century after 1984, we would still have all our freedoms, but the language would be all but gone?

Orwell was right. “Abstract” doesn’t begin to describe modern management language. It’s all abstractions; things cobbled together with “in terms of“, in imitation of science. It was predicted by a lot of people. Jean Amery, the Austrian philosopher, resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor, predicted shortly before he committed suicide in the 1978 that our language would become “professionalised”, rendered into pseudo science, made abstract – that we would lose our “home” in it, as under Hitler his native language had been depleted and distorted and ceased to be a home for him.

If you were going to try and correct it, you might say to a chief executive, “Make it concrete. Just remember language has to be concrete; if it’s not concrete, it doesn’t work. Don’t even speak if you can’t make it concrete.” Think of Churchill’s speeches. Imagine Churchill trying to persuade the British people to stand up and fight in 1940, and 1941, in this sort of language. It wouldn’t work. Everything he talked about -streets and gutters, beaches – were what people understand. Everyone understands language when it’s concrete. In 1955, Churchill said, “Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world?”  We can’t improve that sentence.  It can still scare us – and it’s the verb that does it.

Management language seems to me like living in a cheap motel – the kind that creates a kind of stasis from which you emerge in the morning in every detail exactly the same as you were when you went in. Nothing has happened to your state of mind. You have been as if frozen. Nothing has excited you at all. In a motel, ironing a shirt suddenly becomes the most important thing in the world.  Holiday Inn is the acme of this kind of accommodation – they are called Holiday Inns because in them time itself has a holiday. It’s the genius of the Americans. This language does the same thing. It puts you in a mental stasis – nothing happens, not to the listener, not to the speaker.

As a test, go through the Financial Review. Read the quotes from chief executives. They all say the same thing and in the same terms.  This is the public language of what used to be called commerce.  It wouldn’t matter if it stayed in the Financial Review – a pity for those people who have to work in private sector businesses, but they’re well paid, for 40 hours a week, speaking drivel. It’s the price you pay for work. But it gets out.  It spreads beyond the CBD.

Management language eliminates all imaginative possibility; all lyric, all ironic possibility. You can’t tell a joke in it, you can’t sing a song in it – unless Phillip Glass could do it. It’s a language that simulates thought. It sounds like you’re thinking, just as it also, particularly in mission statements, simulates emotions. Mission statements are always passionate: “We are passionate about our commitment.. going forwards”. They often talk about “delight” – the old satisfied customer is not enough, only something close to ecstasy will do

Here’s a company, BAE Systems, talking about “delight”:

We will delight all our customers, both internal and external, by understanding and exceeding their expectations.

BAE Systems is the world’s largest manufacturer of guided missiles. They go on to say how they will, “live by their values”. In common with other companies in the arms business and other kinds of military supply, including mercenaries, BAE say they will always “live by their values”, “integrity is at the core of everything” they do. Blackwater (before it changed its name to Xe), Titan, CACI – not to mention Enron – have mission statements that almost glow with virtue. Meanwhile teams of lawyers work to save ward off nasty actions brought against them alleging corruption all over the world.

If mission statements stayed with BAE Systems, I wouldn’t care so much. But they have crept into schools. Children in Grade 2 now have to learn to write mission statements – “Write a mission statement, laminate it, put it on the wall. Get every member of the class to sign it.”  They are mission statements about their core values and their focuses. Or their foci. In fora.

Now there are all sorts of things, it seems to me, to loathe in modern language – in modern political language and in the language of the media, even sport. I thought horse racing was the one haven of vernacular English left, because there were horses involved, and jockeys, and they don’t listen to the language of the modern office. Then I was listening to a race the other day and the caller talked about a horse “going forwards”. And at that moment I found myself wondering – in what sense?  In terms of galloping?  It occurred to me that, perhaps before we started “going forwards” ten years ago, human history had just been a history of milling about. We just milled.

I’m not entirely opposed to management. I was a bit of a fan of Peter Drucker at one stage. Tom Peters is not all that bad. I suppose “total quality management” probably did as much good as harm. I wished we’d had it in the Prime Minister’s office on a few days when I worked there. But I wish it had stayed in the private sector. It didn’t, of course, because we privatised a large part of the public sector. Then what remained of the public sector decided it had to be more into management theory than the private sector. Like most new converts, they became more zealous than any that preceded them. So, now, the public sector is where you find the worst of the management jargon.

By the public sector, I mean not only government departments, but also schools.

This is for a classroom mission statement: “Producing a mission statement is a process used for developing an agreed sense of purpose.” Has there been anything in education theory, up till now, which says the students must have an agreed sense of purpose? What you’re looking for in a kid is a sense of his, or her, own purpose – aren’t you? Or any purpose, including someone else’s – but not an agreed purpose. I mean why should they have an agreed purpose? This might be a good idea for a business organisation – but a group of 8 year-olds?

The instructions for composing the mission statement go on: “Have all the students in the class signed the mission statement.” They can’t even sign! They’re eight years old! “Laminate and display on door of classroom. Program achieved.” There are also, “Students’ habits of the mind: time management, goal setting, reflective problem solving, internal locus of control for learning, risk taking.” At the same time as they’re telling them to put “risk taking” in their mission statement, they’re telling them not to go on the monkey bar without a helmet! They’re not allowed to climb a tree, or do anything, without a helmet and gloves and a pair of goggles.

Risk taking is a business idea, but it ends up in places like the fire brigade, the CFA. This is a very serious part of it. In 2009, on what became known as Black Saturday, the Royal Commission revealed that the CFA’s management was catastrophic, especially in combination with the other responsible authorities. What’s more, the language was very much a part of this. For weeks, we listened to “fire events impacting” on various parts of the state. We never heard anything like the words “heat”, “burn”, “scorch”. No one described a fire. And when asked why a fire wasn’t described, they said, “Well, it was unprecedented.”

The fire might be 60 feet high and come at 50 miles an hour and it might veer wildly in all directions and you may actually be incinerated before it the fire front reaches you – none of these things were described. There were precedents, of course. But management theory is all new-fangled, so it can’t imagine a precedent. But there have been fires before. You could find a fire if you wanted one, to describe it. Dante is a precedent. But there was none of that at all. And there was nothing about what was happening on the day. To the question: “What did you do to fulfil your role of strategic planning?” one reply was: “It was simply a matter of populating the template.” Now, while Marysville was burning down, they were “populating the template”. They were “value adding”. They said it over and over again, “I was value adding. It was a risk based approach”. It was embarrassing to read.  Counsel assisting, Jack Rush QC, was provoked to gentle mockery at one point. “And what did you iterate then?” he asked, “iterating” being one of the favourite management school words of the people he was questioning.

One day, Rush read to the Commission a vivid description of the 1939 bushfire known as Black Friday. It described the scale and nature of the fire.  No one who had read it could be left wondering if he might have stopped it with a Honda pump and a hose. Had they read this, instead of the nebulous public warnings they received, I’m sure the people living on my road would have left on Black Saturday. They were too young to remember Ash Wednesday, much less Black Friday – but we are – or at least before management language, we were – able to describe things that people have not seen. In the end, the authorities last year did not have the words to warn people. To say “get out” in a way that people understood. Not only did their management theory not work, but the language didn’t work. They didn’t have the words and they didn’t have the gumption.

In keeping with the modern idiom the fire authorities and the politicians were forever talking about the fires’ impact, their potential to impact – about fire events impacting. Impact now does for everything from being hit by a meteorite as you walk out the door, to tripping over the dog – the dog impacts on your foot.  Or tinea might impact on your foot. All the words in between that once you would have used to describe the difference between an itch, and a stumble, and a meteorite strike, have all been lost. They’re vanishing from people’s minds. They can no longer think of them.

Or “outcome” – we used to have “consequence”, and “result” and “effect” and all the nuances of language that were known to five pound a week people and other people as well. People might say, “as a consequence”, or “in consequence”. They’ve all gone now. It’s just “outcome”.  And “outcomes-based”. All of us over 35 were not educated in “outcomes-based” education system – there were no outcomes, we’re not outcomes-based. That’s why we’re all morons. We don’t know anything, because people completely ignored our outcomes. But at least now our grandchildren are outcomes-based.  And so are the industries they will work in. Until recently, industries weren’t outcomes based, which must be why nothing of an industrial nature ever happened.

There have always been people who have worried about the language. Sam Johnson was, Noah Webster was, George Orwell was, Karl Kraus and many others – and all with good reason. But we have better reason. This is worse.  This is not imposed: it is systemic. The spread of management theory and the kind of economy we live in, a world where we are all “customers”, has created systemic disease in the language. It’s not just a matter of grammar; this is beyond the reach of grammar and plain English. It is not only the public language, but the language of work and recreation, which means the vernacular is being eaten away as well.

There are good reasons for it which I haven’t got time to explain. Language in an information society becomes the assembly line, and you don’t want possibility in an assembly line and you want everything to be safe and reliable and subject to quality assurance. You don’t want anyone breaking out from it into fancy or humour – you want their mental lights turned right down, you want them dim. So, you create a language which is a series of abstractions, crudely linked together by clichés and stuffing that give the impression of understanding and thought when in truth no such thing is going on. That’s a crude explanation, but it’s roughly like that.

The universities have rolled over totally. The places where we might have expected this language to be defended are now among the places where it has taken deepest root.  And, like a good virus, it has attached itself to worst tendencies of academic writing and the most confounding academic follies and mutated into varieties of cultural studies and other things.

It goes into the Church. Cardinal Pell ended his pastoral statement two years ago with, “And may the Lord be with you as we move forward.”  Until now, the Catholic Church has never felt the need to say “going forwards” or ‘moving forwards’ at the end of any blessing, as far as I understand. It’s not just the Catholics; the church of St Martin in the Field has a mission statement attached to its front wall in Trafalgar Square. It talks about its “excellence in hospitality”. For centuries this church was a place of charity, handing out bread and soup, but now with “excellence in hospitality”, it’s doing things in style.

The Anglicans, in the Sydney Diocese, found they’d lost $160 million. So they got in a consultant, the plague rats of this language, and the external review found that the Glebe Administration Board “was not able to cope with the challenges of the financial crisis for a number of reasons, including a culture of forgiveness instead of hard accountability”.  Silly church!  Wrong culture. “Forgiveness”.  Never heard of it.

If you read the literature, you will see that we come into the world in a “birth event” and go out of it in a “death event”. I saw a gravestone at Sea Lake in the Victorian Mallee. A man had gone out in a “death event” and it was carved into the tombstone that he’d been a “good father”, a “loving husband”, and also a “Ford dealer” – and they had actually taken the familiar blue Ford badge and fixed it into marble.  Out there in the Mallee.  He’d been badged, in death – a Ford dealer, in eternity. I think it’s the most poignant example of value-adding I’ve ever seen.