Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language , Vintage, Sydney, 2003. 198pp pb

Don Watson, Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Cliches, Cant and Management Jargon , Knopf, Sydney, 2004. 354pp hb

Don Watson is correct. There's something deeply disturbing about contemporary launguage use. In schools and universities, in government departments, many areas of journalism, and especially in the corporate realm, people are speaking shit and getting away with it. Death Sentence is Watson's analysis and Weasel Words is his key.

But the malaise identified in Death Sentence is hardly a new thing. Millions of Australians already know that people in power use their language to maintain that power; that language measures and patrols class boundaries; that our inabilities with language can condemn us to economic, social and psychological disadvantage and despair. Many of us, via Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister , have laughed at the strange and tortured beauty of bureaucratic spin and its weasel words.

The guts of Watson's task, therefore, is to tell us about what we already know in a way that deepens our perception of the problem. And unfortunately he doesn't do that particularly well. While Watson is erudite and knowledgeable and his writing has more eloquence and style than just about any of his peers can muster, Death Sentence just doesn't fly. Like Ground-Hog Day it involves numerous repeated beginnings and middles; unlike the movie it leaves us with little conclusion.

Nor is Watson's ultimate answer much of a solution:

The principle tactic is counter-assertion: they say deconfliction , we say Claptrap! Hogwash! And we say it every time – mockingly, aggressively, in sorrow, in anger (182)

That'll sort them out!

It's not immediately clear in this passage (or the book for that matter) just who ‘we' are. Does ‘we' include builders labourers, workers in a call centre, McDonald's employees (‘they say upsize , we say fat sandwich ')? Probably not. It's a slightly weasely ‘we'.

Watson's main problem is that he speaks from the middle class and its values while assuming that he is speaking as the universal subject. When he bemoans the fact that universities ‘once valued and defended culture' but have now swallowed some other creed, the culture he is defending is a very narrow and eurocentric one. His writerly touchstones are authors like Joyce, Eliot, Kafka – those who convey the existential dilemmas of the alienated middle-class man. In other words, he is right about the state of universities but wrong if he thinks they ever were havens of political and cultural enlightenment. Aside from one brief historical accident, most Australian universities have been and remain bastions of class privilege.

The book fails on the historical level as well. Watson clearly believes that things are as bad as (possibly worse than) they've ever been.

Bad as the old language could be, there were always cricks in it and comprehensible, even creative, language could sometimes squeeze through. (30)

Again the questions are: who used this language? to whom was it addressed? and to what end? Would Watson have it that when Churchill et al were exhorting hundreds of thousands of men and women to march to their deaths they weren't using weasel words just because they were eloquent and creative? Weasel words certainly exist; they always have. But the problem is not so much in words themselves as it is in the uses to which they are put.

It still might be the case that things are getting worse – and I suspect they are. Though it is equally possible to argue that we are just going through the kind of dislocation and uproar that rafts of new metaphors have always brought to the language. Think 60s; think any period at all. In order to demonstrate this argument one way or the other Watson needs to incorporate in his analysis a notion of power. Why are things getting worse? Who or what is driving it? Watson must have an answer to these questions because not to is to surrender to the logic of postmodernity – and he surely wouldn't want to do that. We are merely left with the ‘we' and ‘they' of the universal subject's struggle against the evil linguistic other. And it's just not good enough.

In Death Sentence Watson has hit the nail on the head, repeatedly. But rather than driving the point home he has merely played a flat tattoo without much force or penetration. Indeed, this book has the whiff of contractual obligation about it. What should have been a good essay in a magazine like Overland or Meanjin has ended up a mediocre book guilty of one of the sins it seeks to expose, puffery.

Weasel Words complements Death Sentence and does it well. Watson takes us through an alphabetic list of words that can be used deceptively. As is the nature of such dictionaries it is destined to be out of date eventually. How soon that time comes will be the ultimate measure of the significance of its companion.