This link has been bookmarked by 303 people . It was first bookmarked on 30 Jul 2006, by a77ila.
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31 Jul 19
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the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes
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the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
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31 Dec 17
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16 Jul 17
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31 May 17
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18 Jan 17
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19 Sep 16
Cameron Neylon@phylogenomics @CameronNeylon Reminds me of George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language https://t.co/r2d8Yg4egH - worth reading
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17 Sep 16
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05 Nov 15
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generally assumed tha
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struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism
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we shape for our own purposes.
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effect can become a cause
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fail all the more completely because he drinks
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that the process is reversible
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willing to take the necessary trouble
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not the exclusive concern of professional writers
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suffer
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This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence
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political writing
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hackneyed
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phrases tacked together
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without knowledge of their meaning
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perverting the original phrase
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a verb becomes a phrase
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banal
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scientific impartiality to biased judgements
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are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones
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The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
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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.
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consciously dishonest way
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The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness
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gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else
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it is easy
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pretentious, Latinized style
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in other words he is not really thinking
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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?
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political writing is bad writing
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Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.
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- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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07 Mar 15
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15 Jan 15
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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
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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
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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
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If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers
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This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing
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10 Nov 14
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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.
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Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse
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Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
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But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.
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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.
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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.
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The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision
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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.
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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.
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PRETENTIOUS DICTION
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are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.
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oreign words and expressions
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are used to give an air of culture and elegance.
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strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.
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Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois,
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equality.
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This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way.
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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.
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A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
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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?
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The 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.
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Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.
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A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.
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Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought
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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.
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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 anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
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08 Oct 14
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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
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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.
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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 favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel 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.
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but in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities
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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
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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. The 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.
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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’.
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In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing.
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity
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ll 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.
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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought
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In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.
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When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until 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 and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply
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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
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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,
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11 Aug 14
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22 Jul 14
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21 Jul 14
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08 Jul 14
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07 Jul 14
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30 Jun 14
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ike preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes
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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.
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METAPHORS
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Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions,
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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.
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In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible
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euphemism
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A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.
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cuttlefish spurting out ink
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that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
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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.
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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.
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and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern.
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30 Apr 14
kerrygorgoneOrwell wrote a great essay on how big words & superfluous language make it hard to communicate & think: http://t.co/xvmftj46t4 #bizheroes
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13 Apr 14
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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.
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The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.
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In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
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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.
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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.
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What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.
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I think the following rules will cover most cases:
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- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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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.
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18 Feb 14
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06 Feb 14
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02 Feb 14
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s staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision.
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dodged
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DYING
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MEANINGLESS WORDS
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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;
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colloquial
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- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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01 Feb 14
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30 Jan 14
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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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bad habits
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catalogue of swindles and perversions
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By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague,
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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?
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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. The 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.
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our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
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Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless 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.
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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
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let the meaning choose the word,
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- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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 and sensations. Afterward 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:
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they demand a deep change of attitude
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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.
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29 Jan 14
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have 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-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render.
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The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation.
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Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion.
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he jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation.
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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 ever 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 opinion.
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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.
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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 phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’.
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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.
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If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the 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.
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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.
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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 colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.
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A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward 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 favourable to political conformity.
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n our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence 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 the political parties.
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The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline 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 spurting out ink.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Afterward 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.
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One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
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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
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. 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.
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ords 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 ever 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 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.
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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 phrases ‘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 considerations 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.
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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.
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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.
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In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence 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 the political parties.
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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. B
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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’.
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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:
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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?
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28 Jan 14
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Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.
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abuse of language
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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.
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while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’
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are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever 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,
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This is a parody, but not a very gross one.
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A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline 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 spurting out ink.
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Afterward 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.
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- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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-
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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.
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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.
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process is reversible.
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staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision
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DYING METAPHORS.
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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
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VERBAL FALSE LIMBS
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PRETENTIOUS DICTION.
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MEANINGLESS WORDS.
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nflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline 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 spurting 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.
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- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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-
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PERATORS OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS
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PRETENTIOUS DICTION
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MEANINGLESS WORDS.
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Latinized style.
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The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism
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- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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-
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generally assumed
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decadent
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general collapse
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like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes
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natural growth
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and not an
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instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
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an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely
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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
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so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers
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The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision
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either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent
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concrete melts into the abstract
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like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house
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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
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incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying
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-
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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.
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-
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The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision.
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The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it
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almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.
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-
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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.
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Politics and the English Language
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but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language
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Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
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but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts
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It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish
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think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration
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representative examples
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This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.
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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.
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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
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PRETENTIOUS DICTION
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are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements
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MEANINGLESS WORDS.
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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.
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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
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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. The 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.
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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.
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The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism
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- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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-
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language is a natural growth
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abuse of language is a sentimental archaism
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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
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mental vices
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we have the free personality
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first is staleness of imagery
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lack of precision
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Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed
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used without knowledge of their meaning
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with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that
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PRETENTIOUS DICTION
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phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate
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expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous
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MEANINGLESS WORD
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romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality
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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.
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Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
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A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.
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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.
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thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
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salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech,
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-
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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.
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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.
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the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds
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Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.
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strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.
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Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three 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.
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A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.
-
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism.
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
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- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
-
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27 Jan 14
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sentimental archaism
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not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes
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it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.
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The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision
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A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image
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can generally be used without loss of vividness.
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Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning
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The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs.
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PRETENTIOUS DICTION
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The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism.
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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
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dustbin where it belongs.
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-
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general collapse.
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n effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely
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mental vices
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taleness of imagery
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indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.
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lack of precision
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has a meaning and cannot express it
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in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness.
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save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
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elimination of simple verbs.
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dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements
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completely lacking in meaning
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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 phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’.
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Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style
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The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism
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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt though
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- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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olitical 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.
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-
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sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. U
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fail all the more completely because he drinks.
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I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen
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This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose
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like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house
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toe the line
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perverting the original phrase
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be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of,
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elimination of simple verbs
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n addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active
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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,
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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,
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an increase in slovenliness and vagueness
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romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality
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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
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democracy
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The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
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Ecclesiastes
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in other words he is not really thinking.
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the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself
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speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine
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pacification.
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population or rectification of frontiers
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elimination of unreliable elements
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he great enemy of clear language is insincerity
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politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia
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his 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 anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain
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It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear
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What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way aro
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one can choose — not simply accept
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merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought
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designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind
-
-
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must inevitably share in the general collapse
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A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
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necessary trouble
-
mental vices
-
tolerate
-
ollocations
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, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line
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PRETENTIOUS DICTION
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MEANINGLESS WORDS
-
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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and so they are
-
-
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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 though
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bad habits which spread by imitation
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necessary first step toward political regeneration
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because they are especially bad
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staleness of imagery
-
avoidable ugliness
-
lack of precision
-
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
-
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.
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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.
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pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry.
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a verb becomes a phrase,
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PRETENTIOUS DICTION
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dignify the sordid process of international politics
-
jargon peculiar to Marxist writing
-
increase in slovenliness and vagueness
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MEANINGLESS WORDS
-
meaningless, i
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romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality
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Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’
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universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it:
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intent to deceive.
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passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort
-
would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
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second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety 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.
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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.
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Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
-
political writing is bad writing
-
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
-
He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’.
-
inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism
-
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
-
into the dustbin where it belongs.
-
-
-
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 becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
-
languors
-
-
-
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.
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It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, 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.
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have each of them several different meanings
-
fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning
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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? B
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In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing.
-
transfer of population
-
ectification of frontiers.
-
elimination of unreliable elements.
-
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
-
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable.
-
he defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
-
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
-
-
-
language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes
-
abuse of language is a sentimental archaism
-
decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes
-
It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language
-
ets rid of these habits one can think more clearly
-
The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision.
-
DYING METAPHORS
-
they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves
-
phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate
-
give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.
-
they not only do not point to any discoverable object
-
The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another
-
vague phrases
-
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.
-
the results presentable by sheer humbug
-
so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.
-
When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer
-
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought
-
anguage merely reflects existing social conditions
-
we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions
-
Americanisms
-
the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them
-
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
-
merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought
-
-
-
generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it
-
archaism
-
But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.
-
naccurate because our thoughts are foolish
-
mental vices from which we now suffer
-
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.
-
concrete melts into the abstract
-
being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness.
-
Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning
-
appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry.
-
verb becomes a phrase
-
the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds
-
give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.
-
are used to give an air of culture and elegance
-
haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones,
-
the reader accepts this as a simple difference 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.
-
several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.
-
vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities
-
all its words are those of everyday life.
-
The first sentence contains six vivid images,
-
The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first.
-
-
-
George
-
But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.
-
the process is reversible
-
the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
-
incendiarism
-
virile
-
effete
-
traduced
-
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.
-
DYING METAPHORS.
-
the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active
-
ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax
-
give an air of scientific impartiality
-
agueness.
-
That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
-
the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases ‘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 considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way.
-
It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the 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.
-
The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image.
-
(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.
-
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?
-
when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them
-
Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
-
He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’.
-
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 spurting out ink.
-
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning.
-
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
-
language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.
-
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.
-
-
-
Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
-
decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes:
-
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 becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
-
If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration:
-
-
-
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism
-
Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
-
like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.
-
it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes
-
not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.
-
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
-
reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form,
-
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
-
If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed.
-
which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
-
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, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have 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-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render.
-
Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, 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 the English language.
-
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 ever expected to do so by the reader.
-
The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.
-
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 Petain 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.
-
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
-
-
-
Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds
-
The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation.
-
used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.
-
are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour
-
are used to give an air of culture and elegance
-
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
-
MEANINGLESS WORDS
-
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 favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel 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.
-
The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those 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 ninety 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
-
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
-
The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say
-
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
-
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’.
-
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence 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 the political parties.
-
Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
-
this is called pacification
-
this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers
-
this is called elimination of unreliable elements.
-
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:
-
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
-
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism.
-
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
-
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
-
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.
-
-
18 Jan 14
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
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 as 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 avoid perverting the original phrase.
-
a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such 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).
-
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 the English language. 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 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 translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, 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.
-
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 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.
-
. 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 Petain 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.
-
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 phrases ‘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 considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way.
-
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 not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the 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.
-
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. The 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.
-
A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward 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 favourable to political conformity.
-
Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless 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 called transfer 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.
-
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 and sensations. Afterward 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.
-
-
18 Sep 13
-
fairly representative examples
-
grown
-
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.
-
-
-
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation
-
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.
-
In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that
-
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.
-
-
-
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
-
Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.
-
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
-
-
17 Sep 13
-
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.
-
The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
-
-
-
It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language
-
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
-
-
-
, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless,
-
romantic
-
not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority
-
-
-
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation
-
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
-
-
-
but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
-
It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, 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.
-
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.
-
-
-
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
-
-
04 Sep 13
-
bad way
-
eneral collapse.
-
decadent
-
archaism
-
sentimental
-
is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
-
economic
-
political
-
ugly and inaccurate
-
foolish
-
foolish thoughts.
-
slovenliness
-
especially
-
bad habits
-
reversible.
-
spread by imitation
-
think clearly
-
political regeneration
-
fight against bad English
-
not frivolous
-
avoidable ugliness
-
staleness of imagery
-
lack of precision
-
has a meaning and cannot express it
-
indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not
-
inadvertently says something else
-
vagueness
-
incompetence
-
modern English prose,
-
concrete melts into the abstract
-
phrases
-
words
-
visual image
-
‘dead’
-
DYING METAPHORS
-
be used without loss of vividness
-
worn-out metaphors
-
save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
-
lost all evocative power
-
without knowledge
-
incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed,
-
twisted out of their original meaning
-
avoid perverting the original phrase
-
appropriate verbs and nouns
-
OPERATORS OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS.
-
appearance of symmetry
-
elimination of simple verbs
-
the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active
-
oun constructions
-
instead of gerunds
-
Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced
-
appearance of profundity
-
PRETENTIOUS DICTION
-
dress up a simple statement
-
biased judgements.
-
scientific impartiality
-
dignify the sordid process of international politics
-
archaic colour
-
Foreign words and expressions
-
used to give an air of culture and elegance
-
no real need
-
hundreds of foreign phrases
-
Latin or Greek words
-
grander than Saxon ones,
-
Marxist writing
-
words translated from Russian, German, or French
-
easier to
-
make up words
-
than to think
-
slovenliness and vagueness
-
art criticism and literary criticism
-
long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning
-
MEANINGLESS WORDS
-
strictly meaningless
-
do not point to any discoverable object
-
hardly ever expected to do so
-
simple difference opinion
-
political words are similarly abused
-
improper way
-
Fascism
-
something not desirable
-
call a country democratic we are praising it
-
universally felt
-
consciously dishonest way.
-
tied down to any one meaning
-
own private definition
-
hearer to think he means something quite different
-
intent to deceive
-
This is a parody, but not a very gross one.
-
concrete illustrations
-
dissolve into the vague phrases
-
tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way.
-
modern prose is away from concreteness
-
not a single fresh, arresting phrase
-
gaining ground in modern English
-
does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer.
-
set in order by someone else
-
ong strips of words
-
It is easier — even quicker,
-
ready-made phrases
-
less euphonious
-
fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.
-
yourself.
-
cost of leaving your meaning vague
-
save much mental effort
-
significance of mixed metaphors
-
call up a visual image.
-
images clash
-
writer is not seeing a mental image
-
not really thinking
-
five negatives in fifty three words
-
superfluous,
-
write prescriptions,
-
ccumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink.
-
more or less what he wants to say
-
general emotional meaning
-
detail of what they are saying
-
What am I trying to say?
-
will ask himself at least four questions,
-
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
-
What words will express it?
-
s this image fresh enough to have an effect?
-
political writing is bad writing
-
writer is some kind of rebel
-
private opinions and not a ‘party line
-
alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech
-
not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy
-
phraseology
-
urning himself into a machine
-
unconscious of what he is saying,
-
reduced state of consciousness
-
defence of the indefensible
-
only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face
-
euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
-
pacification
-
phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
-
uphemism
-
acts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.
-
All issues are political issues,
-
like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
-
general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
-
mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
-
language can also corrupt thought
-
spread by tradition and imitation
-
felt impelled’
-
probably curable.
-
reflects existing social conditions
-
we cannot influence its development
-
flyblown metaphors
-
does not imply.
-
archaism
-
nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax,
-
let the meaning choose the word,
-
abstract
-
the phrases that will best cover the meaning
-
choose
-
demand a deep change of attitude
-
language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought
-
political quietism
-
freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy
-
-
Wessel van RensburgJournalists/opinionistas should be required to read the last para of Orwell’s “Politics & the Eng. language” monthly: http://t.co/IE3XWGo8jy
-
27 Feb 13
-
03 Feb 13
-
17 Jan 13
-
Politics and the English Language
-
decadent
-
natural growth
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instrument which we shape for our own purposes
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political and economic causes
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thoughts are foolish
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think clearly
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political regeneration
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lack of precision
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staleness of imagery
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meaning and cannot express it
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indifferent
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says something else
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concrete melts into the abstract
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visual image
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lost all evocative power
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used without knowledge of their meaning
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pad each sentence
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OPERATORS OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS
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elimination of simple verbs.
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passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active
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PRETENTIOUS
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dignify the sordid process of international politics
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Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones
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easier
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than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning
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vagueness.
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Many political words are similarly abused
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intent to deceive
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modern English
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dissolve into the vague phrases
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concrete illustrations
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not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer
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It is easier
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leaving your meaning vague
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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?
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connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
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concealing your meaning
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brain is not involved
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phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine
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choosing his words
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favourable to political conformity
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defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face
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Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism
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enemy of clear language is insincerity
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constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain
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needed is to let the meaning choose the word
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put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations
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instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought
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simplify your English, you are freed
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designed to make lies sound truthful
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03 Oct 12
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03 Jun 12
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01 May 12
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21 Apr 12
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18 Apr 12
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22 Mar 12
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24 Feb 12
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28 Sep 11
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11 Sep 11
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individual
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07 Aug 11
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16 Feb 11
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15 Feb 11
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24 Jan 11
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12 Sep 10
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Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness
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03 Sep 10
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12 Jul 10
Mike Stenhouse"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable."
George Orwell http://is.gd/dp7Sv -
30 Jun 10
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31 May 10
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29 Mar 10
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06 Mar 10
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18 Feb 10
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04 Feb 10
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16 Dec 09
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29 Nov 09
A TriaMost 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
#writing #culture #politics #language #literature #linguistics Medium:essay
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05 Nov 09
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02 Nov 09
My Bookmarks"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."
Communism Marxist-Cultism Obama Corruption language english orwell politics writing
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28 Sep 09
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27 Sep 09
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writer
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writer
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writer
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writer
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which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble
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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.
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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
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kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.
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enemy of clear language is insincerity
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18 Sep 09
Marcy GalbreathOrwell: Politics and the English Language
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11 Aug 09
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08 Aug 09
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29 Jul 09
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27 Jul 09
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