In a follow up to my post on a call for simple language, Don Watson had this piece in The Sydney Morning Herald on a similar issue. Watson rallies against management-speak, which has transformed clear everyday language into “meaningless sludge.” He says, “Telling people requires language whose meaning is plain and unmistakable. Managerial language is never this, and being without roots or provenance there is no past from which to learn.”

An example he always uses is that ‘customers are in fact patients’ in a hospital. I agree, as are commuters who use public transport and students at school and so on. I recall at university during protests, the T-shirts with the words ‘I am a student, not a customer’. They had a point.