I was listening to an interesting piece from Radio Australia’s Correspondent’s Notebook programme. Our (that is the Australian) prime minister Kevin Rudd has had an essay rejected from the US journal Foreign Affairs. Apparently the reasoning is that the essay is dense, ponderous and has more than the usual cliché. The Interpreter has a good analysis on Rudd’s rejected essay with also an link to the unwanted piece.

This story reminds of Don Watson’s book Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language. It is about the numbing of the English language due to the encroachment of management-speak in the public sphere. There is even a website dedicated to collecting examples. Bruce Hill on Correspondent’s Notebook calls this credentialism,

“a secret language that only other people within an elite group understand, which excludes others. It’s actually a form of snobbery – it says “If you don’t understand me, it’s because I have special, secret knowledge and you don’t, so you should do what I say because I’m clearly much cleverer than you are”

He ends his commentary by saying,

“Democracy is all about ordinary people making decisions, and to do that they need to have the facts. If experts actually give people clear, comprehensible information, then democracy can work. But if you don’t insist on them doing that, then how can you know what is really happening?”