This book is a clever, bitter skewer of the mealy-mouthed and slippery rats in all areas of business, from education to government. And if you think neither of those fields can be classified as 'business,' you might change your mind after reading Watson's impassioned argument against the administrators who have squeezed the heart and soul out of good, solid English with their "validation subsets of indicators" and "implementation of key initiatives going forward."

If you're the kind of person who cringes when you hear the word "task" used as a verb, or laughs at a sign reading "Commitment to Excellence" in a grungy fast-food restaurant, you might already know about this book. If, on the other hand, you are the kind of person who is thrilled to hear your company is aggressively redeveloping for a paradigm shift, you NEED to read this book. (Probably now, while you can still put it on your expense account.)

Thankfully, the amount of beautifully spun invective in the book outweighs the mind-numbing quotations from corporate leaders, politicians, university professors, and even sports commentators, but only by a small margin. Watson has gathered incredible amounts of the hilarious mismanagements of language from public figures in his native Australia and also from the U.S., known worldwide for its commitment to excellence in the production of "Bush-isms." One of my favorite snippets of gobbledygook comes, not from the mouth of the president, but from his close adviser Donald Rumsfeld, who famously said at a 2001 press conference, "Calibrate me, Dick... calibrate me if I'm wrong." (Oh, Donald, if only we could.)

If you've ever tried to make sense out of a politically-correct college mission statement, or even a syllabus for a class which seems to have been drafted by lawyer parrots, you might need to set the book down mid-way through and take some deep, calming breaths. Just reading some of the tangled jargon which passes as the language of savvy intellectuals today might be enough to give you nightmares of dragging yourself, slow-motion, through an endless morass of paperwork, each demanding an updated status report dutifully written in corporate-ese.

The vivid portrayal of living in an impenetrable jungle of babble is all too real, and its proximity to our normal lives is often frightening. I feel a little shiver of horror tingle along the back of my neck each time I catch myself using the word "closure" or when advising someone to "think outside the box." The weaselisms creep in, simply because we hear them so often.

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Created Nov 04, 2005 at 12:03pm • Submit your own review...