Editor’s Note:
Reposted from the public domain courtesy of www.world-english.org Original title: Politics and the English
Language. The essay was published in
Horizon (magazine) in 1946. Reportedly,
it focuses on political language, which, according to Orwell, "is designed
to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance
of solidity to pure wind." Orwell believed that the language used was
necessarily vague or meaningless because it was intended to hide the truth
rather than express it. This unclear prose was a "contagion" which
had spread to those who did not intend to hide the truth, and it concealed a
writer's thoughts from himself and others. Orwell encourages concreteness and
clarity instead of vagueness, and individuality over political conformity.
Please see footnote at end of Orwell’s essay.
Politics and the English Language
By George Orwell
MOST PEOPLE WHO
BOTHER with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a
bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do
anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language--so the
argument runs--must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that
any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like
preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath
this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not
an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Orwell is the
pen name of author/essayist Eric Blair, who was born in India in 1903. His works include numerous essays and
dystopian novels, 1984 and Animal Farm. He died in London from TB on Jan. 21,
1950. Many consider him the greatest
voice of English literature from 1950 on.
NOW, IT IS CLEAR
that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic
causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual
writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and
producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man
may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all
the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is
happening to the English language.
It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are
foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have
foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English,
especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and
which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one
gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a
necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against
bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional
writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the
meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are
five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they
are especially bad--I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen--but because
they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are
a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number
them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:
(1) I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say
that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had
not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien
(sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to
tolerate.
PROFESSOR HAROLD LASKI (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
(2) Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native
battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as
the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.
PROFESSOR LANCELOT HOGBEN (Interglossa)
(3) On the one side we have the free personality; by
definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its
desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what
institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another
institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little
in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other
side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these
self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very
picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for
either personality or fraternity?
ESSAY ON PSYCHOLOGY in Politics (New York)
(4) All the "best people" from the gentlemen's
clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of
Socialism and bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary
movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval
legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian
organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor
on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.
COMMUNIST PAMPHLET
(5) If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country,
there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is
the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak
canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may lee sound and of
strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that
of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream--as gentle as any sucking
dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the
eyes, or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place,
brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the Voice of
Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to
hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited,
school-ma'am-ish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens.
LETTER IN Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but quite
apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The
first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer
either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something
else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.
This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked
characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political
writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the
abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not
hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their
meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a
prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the
tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly-invented metaphor assists thought
by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is
technically "dead" (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to
being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But
in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which
have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the
trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on,
take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to
shoulder with, play into the hands of, an axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing
in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed.
Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a
"rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently
mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some
metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without
those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is
sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil,
now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In
real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way
about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this,
and would avoid perverting the original phrase.
Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of
picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence
with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic
phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make
contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, having the
effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect,
exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the
elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break,
stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or
adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb as prove, serve, form, play,
render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference
to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by
examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down
by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are given an
appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions
and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard
to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the
hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anti-climax by such
resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of
account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious
consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element,
individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basis,
primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate,
are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific
impartiality to biased judgments. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic,
unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used
to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims
at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words
being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler,
banner, jackboot, clarion.
Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien
regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung,
weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the
useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the
hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially
scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by
the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and
unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated,
clandestine, subaqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from
their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers.1 The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing
(hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad
dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words and phrases translated from
Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a
Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize
formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (de-regionalize,
impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the
English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an
increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
1 An interesting illustration of this is the way in which
the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted
by Greek ones, snap-dragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming
myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of
fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely
word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly
in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long
passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.2 Words like romantic,
plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art
criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not
point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the
reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work
is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately
striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness, the reader accepts
this as a simple difference of opinion If words like black and white were
involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once
that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are
similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it
signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism,
freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different
meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word
like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make
one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call
a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every
kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to
stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind
are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses
them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means
something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot,
The Soviet Press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to
persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in
variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class,
totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary bourgeois, equality.
2 Example: "Comfort's catholicity of perception and
image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic
compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting
at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness . . . Wrey Gardiner scores by
aiming at simple bullseyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and
through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bittersweet of
resignation." (Poetry Quarterly.)
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and
perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead
to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to
translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here
is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to
the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet
riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and
chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels
the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no
tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable
element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3),
above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It
will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending
of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle
the concrete illustrations--race, battle, bread--dissolve into the vague phrase
"success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so,
because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing--no one capable of using
phrases like objective consideration of contemporary phenomena"--would
ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency
of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a
little more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all
its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90
syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first
sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and
chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single
fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a
shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it
is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do
not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops
of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if
you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes,
we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one
from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does
not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing
images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together
long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of
writing, is that it is easy. It is easier--even quicker, once you have the
habit--to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to
say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt
about for words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your
sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less
euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry--when you are dictating to a
stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech--it is natural to fall
into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should
do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent
will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale
metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort at the cost of
leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is
the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a
visual image. When these images clash--as in The Fascist octopus has sung its
swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot--it can be taken as
certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is
naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I
gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in
53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage,
and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and
several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness.
Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to
write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up
with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it
means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply
meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the
whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less
what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea
leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company.
People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning--they
dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another--but they are not
interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every
sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What
am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make
it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably
ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is
avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can
shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases
come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you--even think your
thoughts for you, to a certain extent-and at need they will perform the
important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It
is at this point that the special connection between politics and the
debasement of language becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad
writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is
some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party
line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative
style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles,
manifestoes, White Papers and the speeches of under-secretaries do, of course,
vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds
in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired
hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases--bestial
atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand
shoulder to shoulder--one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching
a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes
stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns
them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not
altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some
distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are
coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he
were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he
is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what
he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this
reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable
to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the
defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in
India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on
Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for
most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of
political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism,
question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded
from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle
machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called
pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging
along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is calledtransfer of
population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years
without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in
Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such
phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental
pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor
defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in
killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so."
Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits
certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I
think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is
an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which
the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified
in the sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of
Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and
covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as
it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish
squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of
politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass
of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere
is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find--this is a guess which I
have not sufficient knowledge to verify--that the German, Russian and Italian
languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years as a result of
dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt
thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people
who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing
is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption,
leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which
we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of
aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain
you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am
protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing
with conditions in Germany.
The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to
write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I
see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical
transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to
avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of
laying the foundations of a cooperative and unified Europe." You see, he
"feels impelled" to write--feels, presumably, that he has something
new to say--and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group
themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of
one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical
transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against
them, and every such phrase anesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is
probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument
at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we
cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and
constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this
may be true, but it is not true in detail.
Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not
through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a
minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone
unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long
list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough
people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to
laugh the not un- formation out of existence,3 to reduce the amount of Latin
and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed
scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But
all these are minor points. The defense of the English language implies more
than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
3 One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by
memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit
across a not ungreen field.
To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the
salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a
"standard-English" which must never be departed from. On the
contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom
which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and
syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or
with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good
prose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity
and the attempt to make written English colloquial.
Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon
word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words
that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning
choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can
do with words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete object, you
think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been
visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to
fit it.
When you think of something abstract you are more inclined
to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent
it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the
expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put
off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can
through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose--not simply
accept--the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and
decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This
last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated
phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often
be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that
one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover
most cases:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech
which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it
out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a
jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything
barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they
demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the
style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English,
but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in these five specimens
at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of
language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for
concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to
claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a
pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what
Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such
absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political
chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring
about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your
English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak
any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity
will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language-and with variations this
is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed
to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. and to give an appearance
of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can
at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one
jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase--some jackboot,
Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump
of verbal refuse--into the dustbin where it belongs.
Pillar to Post footnote:
ORWELLIAN DEFINED:
After a visit to Cuba (2015) I kept hearing George Orwell
speak to me in between drags on his cigarette.
He was calling from a phone booth outside the pearly gates.
His Orwellian dystopia—to me—predicted Cuban communism that
came to power a decade after his death.
The adjective Orwellian refers to these behaviours of The
Party, especially when the Party is the State:
--Invasion of personal privacy, either directly physically
or indirectly by surveillance.
--State control of its citizens' daily life, as in a
"Big Brother" society.
--Official encouragement of policies contributing to the
socio-economic disintegration of the family.
--The adoration of state leaders and their Party.
--The encouragement of "doublethink", whereby the
population must learn to embrace inconsistent concepts without dissent, e.g.
giving up liberty for freedom. Similar terms used are "doublespeak",
and "newspeak".
--The revision of history in the favour of the State's
interpretation of it.
--A (generally) dystopian future.
--The use of euphemism to describe an agency, program or
other concept, especially when the name denotes the opposite of what is
actually occurring. E.g. a department that wages war is called the
"Ministry of Peace" –from Wikipedia.
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