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Politics and the English Language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Politics and the English Language (1946) is an essay written by George Orwell in which he criticizes "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English and asserts that it was both a cause and effect of foolish thinking and dishonest politics. He calls "vagueness and sheer incompetence" the "most marked characteristic" of contemporary English prose and especially of the political writing of his day. The essay also criticizes contemporary writers for preferring the abstract to the concrete, claiming this reduces precision of thought. He notes that insincerity is the enemy of clear prose and that much contemporary political writing was in defence of the indefencible.
Orwell begins by asserting that the English language is in decline, but that the decline is reversible. He gives five examples of bad contemporary writing and criticizes them for "staleness of imagery" and "lack of precision." The essay then described the "tricks" his contemporaries used to avoid the work (and thought) of constructing clear prose: overused (or "dying") metaphors, "operators or false verbal limbs" that were used in preference to simple verbs, pretentious diction and "meaningless words."
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As part of his definition of meaningless words, Orwell argues that "private definitions" of words in political discourse are used by writers dishonestly: the user has his own meaning, but allows his audience to think he means something different. Words that he believes have lost all meaning or that have multiple meanings depending on the speaker and the audience include "democracy", "socialism", "freedom", "patriotic", "realistic", and "justice".
To give an example of what he is describing, Orwell "translates" Ecclesiastes 9:11 ,
| “ | 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. | ” |
into "modern English of the worst sort,"
| “ | 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. | ” |
Orwell concedes that it was easy for his contemporaries to slip into bad writing of the sort he describes, and says that the temptation to use meaningless or hackneyed phrases was like a "packet of aspirins always at one's elbow." In particular, they are always ready to form the writer's thoughts for him to save him the bother of thinking, or writing, clearly. However, he offers the reader six rules that he says will help them avoid most of the errors in the examples of poor writing he gave earlier in the article:
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These rules are still widely suggested as a guide for modern writers.
Elsewhere in the essay, Orwell examined what he believed to be a close association between bad prose and inhumane ideology:
| “ | Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement |
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Orwell comments that:
| “ | 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. 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. | ” |
- Original text:
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- Complete essay with search option, which cites source as Horizon, April 1946