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29 Sep 11
Trina KolarikPolitics And The English Language by George OrwellPublished in Horizon, April 1946; Modern British Writing ed. Denys Val Baker, 1947.
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09 Feb 11
suedavis68i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. -
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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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the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes
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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. 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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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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The point is that the process is reversible.
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to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration
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two qualities are common to all of them. 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, 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 of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
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Dying metaphors
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A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image
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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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a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase.
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Operators, or verbal false limbs
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Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render.
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Pretentious diction
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used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements
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It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory 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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Meaningless words
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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.
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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 way. Many political words are similarly abused.
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In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
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no one capable of using phrases like 'objective consideration of contemporary phenomena' — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
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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.
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If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences
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The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image.
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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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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 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. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion 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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one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech.
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one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy
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A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine.
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this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.
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In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
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Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
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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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21 Jan 09
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25 Aug 08
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he 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 of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
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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.
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The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
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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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attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.
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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.
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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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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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20 Aug 08
Marqs ShortMost 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 arguments run
language politics english essays consciousness civilization orwell 1946 delicious
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11 Aug 08
Inja Lini. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can -
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10 Aug 08
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