AS Don Watson prepares to give the annual address, “Language and Power”, at the Independent Scholars Association’s national conference on Thursday evening, he is, as usual, “never quite sure what I’m going to talk about”. But we know, don’t we readers?

For, not only is Watson, the former speechwriter to Max Gillies and Paul Keating, the author of “Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language” and “Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words: Contemporary Cliches, Cant and Management Jargon,” but he’s been railing for the last decade against the insupportable managerial language that has infiltrated our whole culture.

Why, even AFL players puffing from their exertions talk about “negative outcomes”.

“If only it were only spoken by the corporations,” he complains, “It’s permeated politics, the health system, the public service, education – even kids in school are taught to write mission statements.”

That’s not surprising, he reflects, because most people, are employed in jobs where they’re required to write this kind of “assembly line” prose, using abominable words such as “product” and “consumer” in day-to-day English.

“We’ve had our language taken from us,” he says.

There are occasions when this has been downright dangerous. Watson cites the kind of official language used during the build-up to the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria.

“People were never told what a fire would be like on a day like this, instead they heard of ‘a fire event’ or ‘a wind event’… you can go to the Bible and find descriptions of a fire… you could talk about fronts of fire leaping seven kilometres in a single bound… you could say ‘run for your life,’ or ‘get back’.”

But, Watson notes, when asked at the Royal Commission what he had been doing, one officer replied: “populating the template”. George Orwell noticed the same propensity for obscurity in flyers handed around during the London Blitz, “but it’s 10 times worse now,” Watson suggests.

“What has come of our managerial mindset is a managerial language, but education is the one that really gets to me,” he goes on, “and the universities are completely rolling over to this.”

It enrages Watson that the managerial lingo has infiltrated our public discourse to render it entirely lacking in “spontaneity and ideas, humour and poetry – all those possibilities are removed.”

And another thing, why do we have to misuse perfectly good words? He assures me that he’s “not a grammarian, but grammar is useful” and “modern language is beyond the reach of grammar.”

Take the word “impact”, once used as an intransitive verb, followed by a preposition. Once you used to “impact upon” something. Now you just “impact’. Why not say “hit” or “bash”, he suggests?

Watson’s number one bête noire, is the fashionable word “outcomes”, preferred over “results” or “consequences”.

“That goes with the entire idiotic ‘everything must be outcomes-based approach’.”

I venture my own bête noire, “inappropriate” – “Oh, yes,” he groans, “that one comes from some kind of weird culture of political correctness… once we would say ‘that’s simply not right,’ or ‘it stinks’ — we’d use the vernacular.”

And talking of that, he judges his old boss Paul Keating as “the last great exponent of the vernacular… he had an amazing grasp of the western Sydney vernacular, many of the phrases he used I’d never heard before, coming from a farm in Gippsland.”

Contrary to popular impression, Watson did not write Keating’s best lines. “It was fun to work with him because he liked words… stuff written in obscure, feeble language would make him really angry.”

Watson is firing now. He admits that language is always under threat, as the famous lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson used to say, but believes it’s really in trouble now, with kids dismissing their parents and others who lived before the outcomes-based era as “probably morons”.

Yes, “the language has lost its subtlety and its savagery”.

“I can go on an on,” Watson says. “Whatever I say will be on that subject.”

Annual ISAA Lecture, Fourth Floor Conference Room,  National Library of Australia, on “Language and Power,” by Don Watson, 6pm Thursday October 18, cost $5.

Conference details and registration at www.isaa.org.au