Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Weasel words

Via Mental multivitamin, here's an interesting article and interview with the author of Death Sentences: How Clichés, Weasel Words and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language, Don Watson.

I like his proposal that
if companies are serious about their "corporate social responsibilities" they should make the language one of them. They could put "saying what we mean and meaning what we say" into their mission statement. They could employ in-house editors.
The weasel word I've heard around work recently is "advantage" used as a verb—"We need to advantage our resources/market share/fill-in-the-blank."

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