Don Watson, fish and chips, and wearing concrete elbow patches on linguistic nostalgia

(Above: a vision of golden chips, or as a New Zealander would say, chups, hold the fush).

One of the sweetest joys of the intertubes is the collapse of all moral, ethical and practical standards when it comes to the writing of the English language.

Eventually with a bit of luck we'll get fully back to the good old days, back before the state of flux in which Shakespeare wrote his masterpieces, back before the vowel shift and the wandering 'e'. back before the anarchy of Chaucer and middle English, back indeed to the vigor and anarchy of the primal swamp of old English. Where if you said something, or scribbled it down, it was okay, provided that the intended recipient sort of understood what you meant. Now tweet me that and who knows, I might c u lata.

To reach this linguistic haven, we need to defeat the pedants and the dullards, who constantly seek to do down the imaginative use of language. They found their home in the eighteenth century, in the striving of the likes of Dr. Samuel Johnson to fix the language through his dictionary (though fortunately he was so eccentric that the exercise provided much amusement, especially when it came to describing Scottish folk).

Perhaps the worst outcome was L'Académie française, and its wretched dictionary, which attempted to fix the French language in amber, like a mosquito locked in to a plot for a Stephen Spielberg movie featuring the reconstitution of dinosaurs. The French for a long time fought against Franglais - the contamination of French by English - but frankly Je ne care pas for that kind of thinking, in fact Je suis tired of it. Vivre le Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad with his letter to a Parisian landlord:

PARIS, le 7 Juillet. Monsieur le Landlord--Sir: Pourquoi don't you mettez some savon in your bed-chambers? Est-ce que vous pensez I will steal it? La nuit passee you charged me pour deux chandelles when I only had one; hier vous avez charged me avec glace when I had none at all; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice. Savon is a necessary de la vie to any body but a Frenchman, et je l'aurai hors de cet hotel or make trouble. You hear me. Allons. BLUCHER.

Now what prompts this outburst? Why it's because these days there are pompous pedants always ready to savage writers about their abuse of the English language, and being what it is, the intertubes will always mock their pronouncements. Here's Don Watson with Buzzwords from the McDonald's bucket:

The jargon-infested public pronouncements of modern political and financial leaders are all potato and no meat. Whatever the shape of the new economic order, the language is sure to continue on its present depressing course.

Well we can see where this is heading. It's clear, concise communication, and tremendously predictable, especially for those of us who will remain fiskally and linguistikally challenged. But thankfully in the very next para Watson is unfrocked, de-personned, by an aberration well known to users of the intertubes, involving the pesky mis-interpretation and placement of the aberrant question mark:

Frankly the interpolation of question marks perks up this tired old piece of nostalgia, hinting at mystery and style in a very Don Marquis' Archie and Mehitable style, much better than pretending Watson's experience of crappy country town fish and chip shops has anything to do with the proper use of the English language (and yes I grew up in a town with fish and chip shops, and they produced uniformly greasy and hideous chips, and if you stop off at country town fish and chipperies today - say Quirindi - you can still get the same hideous grease laden offering, only redeemed by copious amounts of salt).

Watson proceeds to rabbit on about the mis-use of the English language in describing McDonald?s chips (I keed, I keed):

Now, consider a bucket of McDonald's chips – or "fries", as they have become. Consider them, as Michael Pollan does in The Botany of Desire, as the Platonic ideal of French fries: "slender golden rectangles long enough to overshoot their trim red containers like a bouquet." The potato abstracted, globally: so abstracted, it is likely that many people who eat McDonald's fries are unaware or have forgotten that it is potato that they're eating. Just as likely, if they do think of the fries as potatoes, the only breed of potato they have ever tasted is the kind McDonald's demands of its growers and sells not so much as potato as a brand made from potato. That kind is the unnaturally elongated, uniform and almost eyeless Russet Burbank, or in very recent times an even more sophisticated Monsanto invention, the New Leaf.

Then perversely, having celebrated country town fish and chips, and berated Michael Pollan, Watson embarks on his own foodie fantasy, as if discovering the joys of nuance when once a grubby schoolboy hand feeling up pulp would have sufficed:

The subtle differences of flavour, fragrance and texture which distinguish one kind of potato from the many others that exist are unknown to most of the world's regular potato-eaters. Floury and waxy, big, small, smooth and gnarled, deep eyes and shallow ones, sweet, aromatic and bland potatoes, potatoes that bake well and potatoes best mashed, potatoes with red soil or black or grey soil still sticking to them. I mean potatoes both for eating and for talking about: subjective, nuanced, paradoxical, real potatoes; not just carbohydrates but the rudiments of life.

But this of course is all just an elaborate ruse, a kind of rush of words to set up the main game, which is to attack politicians and political speak, as if ponderous pedantry were a recent invention, when as we all know, Shakespeare used Gerard Henderson for direct inspiration when creating his character Polonius in Hamlet.

Shooting at politicians and bureaucrats is very much like shooting at fish in a barrel, especially when dealing with words uttered by the poor buggers when they have to shoot from the hip in the glare of cameras, knowing that if they say something meaningful, direct, explicit, understandable or coherent, a pack of jackals will descend on them, and peck them and their words to pieces. Much like Don Watson dealing with a bit of waffle from the current Premier of Victoria:

"What we do have in this state, I think, is an exciting agenda, going forward, a very positive agenda in terms of education and health, and we've also got some big challenges there that we, you know, need to get on top of."

So what's the poor bugger to say?

In this state we have a very dull unimaginative agenda, a very negative agenda in terms of education and health, hoping that we can keep the train on the rails, rather than off frolicking in the meadows, and that way we hope we have no challenges at all, so we don't have to be on top of anything, especially the English language.

Watson of course gets very righteous:

Imagine this sentence broken at random into bits and arranged in the McDonald's bucket like fries. It's a bit wordy, so we can take out everything up to exciting agenda and everything after challenges – unless you are especially keen to get on top of them. This will leave room for his next sentence that day – "And I've indicated that public transport is an issue in our state" – which was to say he had "indicated" that something the public knows from maddening experience was an "issue", though not to say why he thought we needed to know that he had "indicated" what we already knew, or why countless cancelled train services were an "issue", as opposed to a pain in the neck or a consequence of bad management or policy. Try not to think about it; just put it in the bucket and move on to the next sentence:

I've announced a number of initiatives in terms of improving our public transport system, but tackling congestion in public transport and on the roads remains a key agenda issue for me, going forward.

Well actually I find the potato metaphor (or is it a simile, whatever) over-extended, and over-abused when dealing with a potato head talking to potato heads about issues for which - look at NSW transport at the moment - no viable solution is available. So of course you're going to get mealy mouthed clot eared pious nonsense. And where?s the ?arm in that?

But Watson is relentless in his use of the potato. On and on he goes, forcing every bit of starch he can from the spud in his bid to stiffen users of English language:

What you have, then, is a bucket containing everything that modern managers (including premiers) need to make sentences, as McDonald's customers find in the bucket everything they need in the way of potatoes.

This is the meat and potatoes of politics and management – without the meat. And there's no nourishment in the potatoes. And, although it is almost certain they are committed to diversity, no variety. In truth, the Premier might have assembled his words in all manner of other combinations and still said much the same thing – that is to say, nothing of consequence.

Managerial language is today's public language, the language of politicians, bureaucrats and chief executives; of all managers, in other words, including the captains of cricket teams who, with no apparent strain, are likely to tell us that Andrew Symonds might "impact the team in his personality" or that Herschelle Gibbs has "made an effort in terms of improving his lifestyle".

Now if I were being perverse, I could of course retreat to the sublime send up of the abuse of English language on view in George and Wheedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody (here):

April 16.—The night of the East Acton Volunteer Ball. On my advice, Carrie put on the same dress that she looked so beautiful in at the Mansion House, for it had occurred to me, being a military ball, that Mr. Perkupp, who, I believe, is an officer in the Honorary Artillery Company, would in all probability be present. Lupin, in his usual incomprehensible language, remarked that he had heard it was a “bounders’ ball.” I didn’t ask him what he meant though I didn’t understand. Where he gets these expressions from I don’t know; he certainly doesn’t learn them at home.

Not that I'm accusing Don Watson of being a cad or a bounder, but he really should look at the exigencies that force the current perambulations around the truth performed by politicians. Like the GFC. Oh and please excuse the question marks, they?re as ?ound in the original text:

To save my life, I could not speak credibly about economics for 10 seconds, yet I can see why the ?nancial bubble took so long to burst. It was because all that ?nancial innovation was manifestly good. So good and so manifest that, whether it was in making millions or having a title to their own modest home, it inspired wonder in those who felt the bene?ts: wonder at the great and mysterious power of the market that innovation unlocked for them; wonder at the genius of the market, and at the power the market moved in them.

A New York hedge fund manager told me in 2005 that he could not account for his dizzying success without believing in "some ... greater force" – he did not have a word for it. An earlier generation would not have hesitated to call it Providence. We are less articulate about the nature of the divine, and more likely to claim all the credit for ourselves, but people like that hedge fund manager are co-religionists with the old capitalists in the sense that they are believers; and believers are believers, whether they believe in God's tremendous ear or the robustness of the distributional assumption.

What we have here is a writer drunk on words, and the power of abuse they offer up, so that the righteous can smote the unworldly and the tongue-tied. As if it's somehow necessary to understand provenance or even providence. As if we must all somehow be locked in a time bubble of Puritanism. If we call on the use of providence, can a call for witch trails be far behind? Or is that trials?

And only a delusional writer could somehow see newly creative uses of the English language as an explanation of how the GFC came to pass:

It is much harder for an economics ignoramus to explain why the bubble burst: to what degree cleverness, cupidity, Alan Greenspan or faith in the ef?cient-markets hypothesis brought about systemic failure. As ever, such questions can only be answered by experts. Let the ignorant choose their favourite. What seems a safe conclusion is that the world financial system was built on all kinds of bogusness – the more bogus, the more pretending to predictive science. The dogma of free markets, the new credit instruments, the disguised con?icts of interest among the credit ratings agencies, the compliance of governments and central banks – it was all phoney. And the language with which insiders persuaded themselves and each other that their schemes were downright inspired, and the rest of us that they were at least sound – the language was phoney too. This perverse, cabalistic, technocratic language was part of the general folly.

So a mis-use of language also explains the great depression, the south seas bubble and the folly of the Dutch tulip boom, not to mention the way computer geek nerd speak clearly produced the great IT crash? This sir, is more cant and dribble, nonsense dressed up in verbal finery.

No doubt, in what remains of the ?nancial industry, people are still using the buzzwords and pretending to science, but not so often in places where the rest of us can hear it. At last we hear words we recognise, even if it takes an effort of memory: words like greed, corruption and stupidity, which describe concrete things with more precision than the technical language they have replaced.

Stupidity is a concrete thing? Why I'd associated concrete more with patios or paving, or even autobahns. But this is just so that Watson can embark on a standard rant against all kinds of innovative words describing innovative concrete activities, performed in a transformative way which will no doubt transform the world at large, and filter on to the intertubes where they will undergo a virtuous virtual transformation. Naturally innovation is on his list. Oh yes, he has a little list. Actually a very long list:

Innovation also has much to answer for. When we talk of embedding innovation in legislation, or in company cultures, or in departments of housing or ?nance, or in local councils or schools, we embed a platitude – a husk of a word with just the pretence of truth, little different from a ?ction or a lie. Of course, an organisation is often better for being innovative. It is not a bad ambition to have – to introduce something new. So long as the new is better than the old. But in an innovative culture inferior thoughts – including ?awed or stupid thoughts – might be preferred over good ones for no better reason than the newness with which they satisfy the creed of innovation.

Oh there's the fey cleverness and the abstruse put down always to hand:

No one dies, of course. Or to put that another way: "Whatever the adverse outcomes, in terms of language, death is not one of them, very often." It is not key. The present ?nancial crisis will pass. It will wreak its creative havoc and leave us with a new, well-regulated economic order, on which the world's next generations may depend. At least let us imagine such a happy future. But in this new order, what language will our leaders and managers speak? What will be the language of work and education? Will the new order discard all those abstract nouns that require equal numbers of in terms of to hold them together, and hardly fewer impacts for when they meet? Will they still call education learnings? Will they still describe sacking staff as a synergy-related headcount reduction?

But if you're Evelyn Waugh writing about the funeral industry, you need innovative people dealing out innovative concepts with fine verbal flourishes. Where else would your satire come from? Where indeed would Don Watson himself be without such people? Finally even he has to come clean and admit he loves it, he needs it, he admires it:

In a sense, management language deserves our admiration; like many successful weeds, pests and viruses, it has adapted and thrived.

But then of course comes the mordant, morbid posturing, like a goth stationed outside Harajuku railway station in Tokyo, mourning what's been lost, and it's not just Wuthering Heights and Victorian corsets and lace:

Nuance, humour, irony, metaphor, invention, streams of consciousness or fancy, the vernacular – hundreds of elegant and useful words and phrases have gone the way of the telex and the roneo machine. Management language elbowed aside everything that a modern organisation did not need. It strangled original thought. What the market could not turn into commodities management could – with language. Everything, including a 10-year-old child's schoolwork, became product. The arts became an industry; artists, practitioners and works of art, artworks. Football players became accountable and played accountable football. Every drongo wanted closure. Whoever they were and whatever they did, managers addressed their charges in management buzzwords, and only when the answers came back in the same terms did they feel secure in their authority.

Oh enough already. I can already imagine a conversation in the publisher's office as the hacks gathered to deal with Don Watson's tome, a product, as it so happens to be sold and bought, and packaged, and dressed up with sharp elbowed marketing techniques, including pictures of crows and foxes, and even a prompt that suggests the work is most enjoyable when read aloud.

Naturally Watson can only see gloom ahead, as all verbal conservatives must do, and as all verbal conservatives managed when James Joyce introduced Ulysses to the world. Because Watson is really using the words to slag off the things he hates - bureaucrats in government departments who don't give a toss about their client, banks who aren't really customer focussed but instead driven by clock watchers anxious to escape their captivity as soon as they can, politicians forced to endure water torture by media and then able to retreat to their office to grope the office assistant, school teachers who imagine that writing a five hundred word essay regurgitated from an encyclopaedia is somehow more useful and imaginative than a tweet or a piece of rap.

Whatever the shape of the new economic order, the language is sure to continue on its present depressing course. Can anyone imagine a premier sometime in the future speaking to us in a spontaneous and amusing way? One might as well imagine a government department that isn't values-driven, a bank that isn't customer-focused, schools that teach rather than deliver learnings and outcomes. Far from retreating, the public language will increasingly invade the private sphere: the patio, the spa, the gymnasium, the bedroom.

And of course this kind of deep seated mock turtle despair is only useful when you don an Oscar Wilde affectation of doomed despair. With perhaps a wan Noel Coward smile, and a bemused vision which requires an Orwellian plain speaking defiance, never mind that once upon a time a word like refusenik would have been refused entry to the English language as a hopeless aberration, a bastard distortion, a shameless co-joining of Russian otkaznik with refuse (which led the world in a similar way to such strange outcrops of thought as sputnik).

Oh yes, once the rebels were outside the gates, refused permission to emigrate, and now suddenly they're inside Don Watson's compound:

There will be refuseniks, of course, and not all of them in nursing homes. They will continue to speak and write in whole sentences, use concrete words and phrases, recite poems on their bicycles and "fasten words again to visible things". It will be a kind of boutique language, spoken by a substantial minority, perhaps with their own FM radio station and wearing small badges on their lapels.

Oh how quaint and twee. Perhaps they will remember and recite books in the style of the inhabitants of the world of Farenheit 451, as imagined by Ray Bradbury. Perhaps the badge could read "I only speak concrete language, do you?", and the FM radio station could promote concrete language, and the music would of course be Musique concrète, and the poems would of course be in the form of concrete poetry, perhaps shaped like the mouse's tail in Alice in Wonderland, or Archie's efforts on his typewriter, with a few keys stuck.

And this bedraggled group of refuseniks will of course stick to FM radio rather than the new fangled digital or intertubes radio, and quite possibly have concrete patches on the elbows of their concrete corduroy blazers.

Naturally, in the main they will be middle-class but there will also be some from factories and farms, the older classes, and the odd politician risen from them, who do not want their memories ground in the churn. So long as they don't burn down learnings centres or in other ways hinder synergies, there should be no need to form secret societies and meet under freeways at night. They will be tolerated as readily as society now tolerates the people who grow old potato varieties, or buy them in little health food shops.

Indeed. And I suggest they adopt the humble question mark as their new secret society symbol. For doesn?t that suggest that in the new world order there?ll be constant attempts to undermine their cause, and reduce it to cheap comedy and cornball laughs and ritual humiliations and mockery of their ?unny ways?

(The SMH column was an edited extract from Bendable Learnings by Don Watson, Knopf, $32.95).

(Below: a concrete cartoon, part of the New Yorker caption contest, so feel free to add your own concrete humor, even if the contest expired back in June, plus further below a concrete cover for a concrete book with examples of how a poor cement mix will lead to the ruin of the English language).