Reddit mentions of Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words [Enhanced with Updates]

I would also recommend reading Death Sentence, The Decay of Public Language by Australian author Don Watson (the book was published as Gobbledygook: How Cliches, Sludge and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language in the UK and Death Sentences: How Cliches, Weasel Words and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language in the US).

Weasel Words (and his other books are also well worth a look), from the introduction.

> Yet the crime is less in the evasion than in the platitudes that hollow out debate even as they talk about starting a 'conversation' with us. The first true crime of managerial politics is that we must push through so much flatulence and dross to reach the nub of it. Take Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina the day a young white man killed seven black people worshipping in a church. She began by saying a 'conversation' was needed, that this was the South Carolinian way. She said 'conversation' three times in her first two sentences. The press then asked her if she would now do something about the Confederate flag flying at the state capitol. She replied: 'I think that . . . at a time like this, you have to look back at what we’ve done. Fifteen years ago the General Assembly at the time they had a conversation.' And she said conversation again and again until someone asked her to say what her position was. And she replied: 'You know, right now, to start having policy conversations with the people of South Carolina . . .' The 'conversation' has been going on since the Civil War. It takes in slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. But 'conversation' puts all that history to sleep: it puts the world to sleep and gives Governor Haley time to test the political waters.
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> These suffocating words and phrases might serve communication within a business, but they thwart it in debate. That is the second crime of modern political language: it stifles thinking. For all the talk of diversity and flexibility, brainstorming and blue-skying, management language is designed to get everyone thinking the same way: or, more accurately, not thinking beyond the part each plays in the process. One cannot think in clichés, or in pure abstraction, or in messages: and to speak or write in these forms is to prevent others from thinking too. One can't think or convey thoughts without images. One can't think in the fog that management jargon deliberately creates. One can't know in it. Whatever else might be better for being process-driven, politics is not. Politics needs thought and language equally. Civil society does.
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> But where will we find the politicians who know anything else? Leave aside the contaminated areas of their working life if they have had one, the universities they attended have rolled over to the managerial cult. The education departments are infected, and schools write reports that leave parents wondering if the outcomes in outcomes-based education are outcomes for their children or for the educators. Even kindergartens send home folios headed 'Early Years Learning and Development Framework Outcomes.'
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> We cannot fail to notice the new technology, the new economy, the new ways of working. It's hard to miss the fact of the revolution we're living through. But we can easily miss the way the new language has crept into daily life. We scarcely recognise the change, and even less do we notice what we're losing. We adapt to the new all-purpose words and forget the many old ones they've replaced. With their passing, meaning fades; poetry and other keys to human possibility, including irony and critical self-reflection, are lost. 'The limits of my language are the limits of my world,' Wittgenstein said. In this sense at least, so-called globalisation and the global revolution in technology and communications have not made for an expanded world, but a diminished one. The knowledge economy is a realm of lost knowledge, of assured ignorance.
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> We come to ignore what has no meaning. We bend our brains around the void, and stop wondering if such as this is an unwitting idiocy or something sinister: 'In the recent evaluation by the Australian Council for Educational Research, school and community members reported that Direct Instruction was having a positive impact on student outcomes, but the researchers were not yet able to say whether or not the initiative has had an impact on student learning.’
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> Read it five times and you will not find a sensible meaning. Not even if you drill down, deep dive or unpack it. The problem is less one of logic than of language. In your mind’s eye try to attach that sentence to some familiar thing, the inside of a ticking clock, for instance. There is no movement: or flesh, or bone or blood. Like many of the entries in this book it is a little absurd: like all but a very few it is also lifeless, and that, as Graham Greene would have said, is the bigger failing and the chief cause of the absurdity.