Anybody who writes a book on language, and particularly its misuse, runs the risk of being dismissed as an old fart. But Don Watson writes so wittily about the problem he discerns, one which he sees as lying at the heart of contemporary life, that most people reading Death Sentence will be both instructed and amused. It ain’t just grammar he’s after, not even the errant apostrophe. As he says, in one amongst many aphorisms, ‘To work on the grammar is like treating a man’s dandruff when he has gangrene’. Or again, when he gets into his stride attacking verbless sludge: ‘Split infinitives are not the problem with public language. In its modern form there are not enough infinitives to split.’
One of the book’s epigraphs is drawn from Orwell’s 1984, where one character points out that Newspeak is designed to narrow the whole range of thought. We may have escaped—at last—the totalitarian spectre that novel raised, but other forms of control have been refined. The new managementspeak, as Watson demonstrates, is now seeping into everything. It may be the language of the leaders rather than the led, and it may be true that people write in manereal-diseased prose because it is expected of them. But now one hears of ‘accountable’ football—from a footballer—or, ‘They risk-taked all day’—from a coach. A brother might even say to his sister how a newborn child ‘value-adds’ to the relationship with his partner. The book provides many examples of the charmless prose we are all subjected to these days, prose which Watson variously describes as clag, gruel or porridge. Keynes, says Watson, would probably have been unable to develop his theories if they had been ventured in such verbiage. You can’t joke in it, sing it, or exercise the imagination in it. Meanwhile it spreads like an oil slick. The language of everyday speech in turn has become ‘less like a language and more like just what happens when you open your mouth’.
How have we got into this mess? The primacy of marketing has a great deal to do with it, as marketing has never been much concerned with truth. Rather, its imperative has been to turn needs into wants. (Or should that be to turn wants into needs? No matter, so long as it turns a dollar.) And marketing now goes everywhere the media goes, which today is just about everywhere. Meanwhile, since the