Death Sentences Quotes

“When the words are suspicious, go after them, insist they tell us what they mean. Go after the meaning of the words. And if the speakers say they are the kind who call things as they see them, that they don’t mince words, and call a spade a spade if not a bloody shovel, go after them even harder. They’re often the worst liars of the lot.”
― Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language

“Similarly, dubbing everyone whose reading of history leads them to conclusions different from the preferred ones black-armband historians; channelling frustrations felt by the politically powerless to the politically correct; isolating chattering classes and elites from a pretended mainstream – all these and many terms of political abuse are common and inevitable in democracies – and all have parallels in tyrannies.”
― Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language

“Consciously or not, the Senator (or his staffer) was only attempting to speak the language of the locals. He was value-adding (or adding alpha as very refined managers say). Value-adding is a mantra of modern economics: it describes the increase in value that a particular manufacturing process, or design or labelling or some other enhancement brings to a product before its sale. Those who talk a lot about value-adding often sound as if they are trying to achieve the same effect with the language: they force it into a new mould, streamline it, give it cachet. They make it into a machine with a minimum of moving parts, but with constant upgrades and (naturally) enhancements. And if you want to get reconciliation taken seriously, you had better put your case in these terms. The Senator’s imitation of the style is a remote sign of the gathering belief that the whole world – or such parts of it that function properly – can be understood either as a metaphor for free market economics and the management philosophies it has spawned, or as an actual consequence of them. That is to say, as an outcome or an event.”
― Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language