New Book

I'm in the middle of a book called Death Sentences by Don Watson. The thesis of the book is that the English public language (not so much the language used in day-to-day conversation, but the kind published by government, corporations, and other institutions) is slowly being choked to death by the cliches, buzzwords, and heavy tongue machinations that are spewed out to us. It can be summed up like this (here I'm quoting from the book).

Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's speechwriter, famously amended [the] Gettysburg [Address] in the way a team of Washington advisers might have. Virtually nothing remained of the poetry or the substance--nothing, at least, to live beyond the next day's news. Today's advisors, well trained in quality management and perhaps even Neurolinguistice Programming, might turn Gettysburg into something like this:

"Eighty-seven years ago our great-grandfathers and -grandmothers built a capacity for the implementation of a new nation [partnering God] with a commitment to harnessing synergies for enhanced outcomes for all stakeholders going forward. Today we are confronting the challenge of seeing whether hopefully a country with these commitments and these synergies will still be there at the end of the day."

Nice. As they say, never use a large word when a diminutive one will do. Go buy the book and give it to your company's marketing director as an anonymous gift.