Don Watson: Language Lost

MILDURA WRITERS FESTIVAL: Don Watson has been thinking about language for a long time. And he doesn't like what's been happening to it. Like a dog with a bone he keeps gnawing at what is being lost and trying to draw our attention to the degraded language that we are absorbing into our daily lives.
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Don Watson has been thinking about language for a long time. And he doesn’t like what’s been happening to it. Like a dog with a bone he keeps gnawing at what is being lost and trying to draw our attention to the degraded language that we are absorbing into our daily lives. He makes us laugh at it when examples are pointed out to us, but even in that, there is a kind of despair. It’s the weasel words, the ‘impactful’, the sentences of nouns strung like beads, as though proximity can provide relationships better than a verb; it’s the taking of ‘ownership’ instead of leadership.

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Fiona Mackrell
About the Author
Fiona Mackrell is a Melbourne based freelancer. You can follow her at @McFifi or check out www.fionamackrell.com