The Sydney Writers’ Festival is a week long extravaganza of ideas and literature. In this session, discussion will be focused on how language is one of the most powerful tools we have to influence, control, uplift and disempower. In his new book, Worst Words, Don Watson laments the barren and absurd management-derived language of our everyday lives, while novelist Anna Smaill explores similar themes of language and state control in her novel The Chimes, which depicts a totalitarian dystopia controlled by words and music. Don and Anna speak to Linda Jaivin about why language is our greatest gift, and greatest weapon