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  • Published: 2 November 2015
  • ISBN: 9780857983442
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $29.99

Worst Words

A compendium of contemporary cant, gibberish and jargon




Don Watson - with his trademark wit and wisdom - says enough already! The English language is complex and evolving, and can win minds, hearts and nations. Why don't we try using it?

Don Watson - with his trademark wit and wisdom - says enough already! The English language is complex and evolving, and can win minds, hearts and nations. Why don't we try using it?

What is ‘cluster deployment’, and how can you be sure to ‘engage multiple stakeholders through your strategic delivery channel’? What’s the difference between ‘backcasting’ and ‘backfilling’ and could it ever matter?

The language of business and work grows ever more depleted, barren and senseless. Politicians hide in thickets of endless repeated messages, platitudes and clichés, or behind such shameless Newspeak as ‘operational matters’. The thing is viral: leaping from corporate windows of opportunity, it has taken hold in universities and schools, the public service, hospitals, local councils, fire brigades, the weather bureau. (What is the difference between rain and a rain event?)

Don Watson returns to the follies he described in Death Sentence and Weasel Words. With his trademark management-jargon mockery, he will make you cringe and laugh and possibly die of shame. But above all he will ask you to resist: to fight in the fields and in the streets – and in the offices and on the internet - and never surrender.

  • Published: 2 November 2015
  • ISBN: 9780857983442
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Don Watson

Don Watson is the author of two previous Quarterly Essays and many acclaimed books, including Caledonia Australis, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, American Journeys, The Bush, Watsonia, The Story of Australia and The Passion of Private White.

Also by Don Watson

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Praise for Worst Words

A brilliant book.

Alan Jones, 2GB

I did find much to enjoy

Stephen Romei, The Australian

For Watson, bad language isn't simply an editor's or writing teacher's problem with slack or inappropriate diction. It's a political problem; it's the ubiquity of things such as obfuscation, bad faith, fear-mongering, and ideological distortion on the part of people in authority, whether CEOs or politicians. (When is a terrorist not a terrorist?) Worst Words will improve the writing of whoever reads it — every corporate tearoom should have one

Owen Richardson, The Age