Don Watson has been thinking about language for a long time. And he doesn’t like what’s been happening to it. Like a dog with a bone he keeps gnawing at what is being lost and trying to draw our attention to the degraded language that we are absorbing into our daily lives. He makes us laugh at it when examples are pointed out to us, but even in that, there is a kind of despair.

It’s the weasel words, the ‘impactful’, the sentences of nouns strung like beads, as though proximity can provide relationships better than a verb; it’s the taking of ‘ownership’ instead of leadership. In a voice rich with wry, he remarks that had someone spoken in today’s tangled public parlance when he was a child growing up in Gippsland, ‘we would have just stared … or hit him with a shovel.’

There’s still something of the country way in Watson’s speech: a dryness, a tempered amusement and a quiet thoughtfulness. Perhaps these were also consequences of growing up in the country?

You’re less socialised, suggests Watson. ‘You spend a lot more time by yourself, probably quite good for your imagination if you don’t do yourself in in the hayshed one day.’ He pauses. ‘You observe more closely. In some way your experience is less extensive but more intense.’

When Watson was growing up, he says, English was still a living language. ‘Now I think it’s a half dead language that most people speak.’ The sort of English that he experienced in school (not that education in the 50s was the finest a person could get, he says) had less ‘issues’. He quotes John Brumby’s latest effort at putting out a discomforting fire, ‘We’ve had some issues over the last month or two. They’ve been issues across Australia and they have affected the Labor brand and I think you’re seeing that reflected (in the poll).’ (Victorian Premier John Brumby. The Age, 1 July 2010 from www.weaselwords.com.au )

The way management language has infected education is possibly what irks Watson most. ‘I think all educational institutions should recognise that part of their brief is to defend the language… to preserve tradition and values, real values, not values as mission statements… but the value of knowledge, of intellectual curiosity, of language.’ After all he says, language is the repository and the means of expression of those things.

Of all the things he learnt at school, what has stuck with him most has been Shakespeare. Now he bemoans, a child can pass through their entire education without reading a word of Shakespeare. ‘That seems to me a sort of insanity. It’s as if schools have to take up the roles of Microsoft and McKinsey and be as much like the wider society as possible – not true. Schools should come first, then McKinsey and Microsoft. The advertising agencies can take control of our brains later if they like.’

Having spent the tumultuous week of Rudd-Gillard federal upheaval in a tent in the Northern Territory, he’s more concern with what’s always ignored, the plight of aboriginal children. When you go somewhere in desperate need like a Northern Territory aboriginal community, he says, you’ll find all the standard words of education policy now used all over Australia, about ‘benchmarking’ students, the goals and values and mission of the education system.

‘But then you’ll find that they’re not getting any education — because the teacher isn’t there. You’ll find children who have been ‘benched marked’ at Year 10 national standard, but they can’t read. This language can be used to describe things that simply don’t exist. And to commit atrocities, in the same way that military language describes other kinds of atrocities, that we [because we’ve becomes so used to it] can easily brush off… These children are the equivalent of ‘collateral damage’ I suppose, but they wouldn’t be called that. They’d be called “shiny examples of the progress of Northern Territory Education going forwards.”’

Watson talks about the ‘learnings from Black Saturday’ and cries ‘What was wrong with ‘learn’ or teach?’’ You’ll find, he asserts that if you read through a modern education policy from either of the major parties there’s no mention of ‘teach, or ‘teachers’ or ‘teaching’. ‘It’s why they can’t think of anything dynamically. It’s all these dead abstractions and catch phrases – ‘learnings’ for God’s sake!’

Watson doesn’t mind new words – that’s fine. But clichés and new words that are used to replace a dozen more precise, colourful or evocative words; now that bugs him.

‘We have this language of infinite variety growing at the edges by thousands of words each year. But in the centre it’s becoming more and more depleted. So we use a word like ‘issues’ over and over again, rather than say what those so called issues might be – there might be a dozen specific words we might use, but we use one very general one.’

When asked if any one he’s met over the past seven years since Death Sentence-The Decay of Public Language was published has defended management-speak, he says, ‘No, never!’

So why then does this abstracted public language persist? We can see it serves a number of purposes. It’s used as a kind of tribal identifier, the management way to say ‘I am one of you. You are like me’. It fills air-time in a media-packed world and for those with the cameras pointed at them it’s the means to ‘duck and cover’. It obfuscates; builds ramparts. It’s used to make the dull sound important, the simple complex, to avoid blame like a child hoping that pointing a finger at the dog will get him out of trouble.

Why does Watson think it persists? ‘Because people are lazy.’ ‘This is a sort of assembly-line language for moving information, so that the people don’t think about what they’re moving. They don’t want to think about it. All you’re moving is information. That’s what we do now in our work. It’s passive aggressive and it’s depressing. And in organisations it becomes a means of bludgeoning people into submission.’

What’s worse says Watson, is how using this language shuts people off from within. ‘It actually puts walls up against your instinct to create with language or to think while you’re writing…It actually closes off those parts of your brain that might say to you as you write, “Ahh, maybe that means this”; or maybe “I could express it in this way”; or, “Here’s a different kind of simile or metaphor”; or “There’s an irony there that I might express”. Even, he says understanding “empathy is required in writing to this person”, as opposed to something more plainly bureaucratic. “There’s room here for a sentiment.” This language throws all those things out.’

Watson was a political speechwriter and adviser to Prime Minister Paul Keating, and is credited with writing perhaps the most enduring speech of Australian politics so far, The Funeral Speech for the Unknown Australian Soldier. Prior to that he had worked with Victorian Premiers John Cain and Joan Kirner and wrote satirical television with Max Gillies on The Gillies Report; all of which seem like less than obvious lines of work for a man with a PhD in history.

‘I think the last authentic user of Australian English was Keating,’ Watson says. ‘Whatever you thought of Keating he had a marvellous command of vernacular English.’

It was when he first met Paul Keating, Watson says that he realized the huge cultural difference between the western suburbs of Sydney and South Gippsland. Keating was never able to master the craft of ‘messaging’ says Watson, in the way that it’s now assumed a politician can only be understood by endlessly repeating the same phrase. Keating was able to sell complex policies through old-fashioned argument.

Watson’s experience working for Keating led to his book Recollections of a Bleeding Heart – A Portrait of Paul Keating. It was followed by the award winning Death Sentence, then Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, American Journeys and his latest book, published last year, Bendable Learnings. In between there have been numerous articles and essays and even a film script, ‘The Man Who Sued God’.

At this week’s Mildura Writers Festival, Don Watson will be presented with the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal. The medal is awarded annually to an Australian writer whose work ‘best reflects the high standards and distinguished literary accomplishments that Philip consistently advocated and exemplified in his poetry’.

Watson jokes, he may be a little nervous that he’ll be shown up with all the poets and literati who’ll be in attendance. When faced with the intimate nature of the Mildura Writers Festival and the opportunities afforded its audiences to engage with the writers’, he confesses he’s the sort of person who tends to (try at least to) go the other way. He wants to head to the Mallee afterwards, and work on his next book, ever the bush muse.

The award he will receive in Mildura though recognises all that we hold dear in literature, and language, and that Watson strives to remind us of by ridiculing what we are letting it become.

‘The sound of a good race caller gives me great pleasure,’ Watson reflects, ‘the way you sometimes hear a natural user of colloquial language…’ There’s great beauty and pleasure in language. ‘It’s important that we keep some sort of standards alive and that we write as well as we can on each occasion, as Calvino said. I wish I could always speak like a 16th or 17th century English gent but I don’t, but we should try.’

And so an accolade from Shakespeare,

(Prospero, Epilogue, The Tempest)