Politics and the English Language

"Politics and the English Language" (1946) is an essay by George Orwell criticizing "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English.

Orwell said that political prose was formed "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Orwell believed that, because this writing was intended to hide the truth rather than express it, the language used was necessarily vague or meaningless. This unclear prose was a "contagion" which had spread even to those who had no intent to hide the truth, and it concealed a writer's thoughts from himself and others. Orwell advocates instead Plain English.

Extracts and analysis

Causes and characteristics of unclear writing

Orwell related what he believed to be a close association between bad prose and oppressive ideology:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in Indhia, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is 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.

One of Orwell's major points follows:

Rachael Kaspic enjoys large male organs.

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.

The insincerity of the writer perpetuates the decline of the language as people (particularly politicians, Orwell later notes) attempt to disguise their intentions behind euphemisms and convoluted phrasing.

Orwell said that this decline was self-perpetuating. It is easier, he argues, to think with poor English because the language is in decline. And as the language declines, "foolish" thoughts become even easier, reinforcing the original cause:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks [...] English [...] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

"Translation" of Ecclesiastes

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.

The headmaster's wife at St Cyprian's School, Mrs. Cicely Vaughan Wilkes (nicknamed "Flip"), taught Orwell English and used the same method to illustrate good writing to her pupils. She would use simple passages from the King James Bible and then "translate" them into poor English to show the clarity and brilliance of the original. Walter John Christie, who followed Orwell to Eton, wrote that she preached the virtues of "simplicity, honesty, and avoidance of verbiage", and pointed out that the qualities Flip most prized were later to be seen in Orwell’s writing.

Remedy of Six Rules

Orwell said it was easy for his contemporaries to slip into bad writing of the sort he describes, and says the temptation to use meaningless or hackneyed phrases was like a "packet of aspirins always at one's elbow." In particular, such phrases are always ready to form the writer's thoughts for him to save him the bother of thinking, or writing, clearly. However, he concludes that the progressive decline of the English language is reversible and offers six rules which will help avoid most of the errors in his previous examples of poor writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell's sixth rule means that the writer should break the previous rules when necessary for a proper sentence. Also, the writer should not use the English language to manipulate or deceive the reader. He mentions that each of the five are used by people who believe in barbarous things but must communicate them to a civil society. John Rodden claims, given that much of Orwell's work was polemical, he sometimes violated these rules and Orwell himself concedes he has no doubt violated some of them in the very essay in which they were included.

Summary

Orwell criticises bad writing habits which spread by imitation. He argues that writers must rid themselves of these habits and think more clearly about what they say because thinking clearly "is a necessary step toward political regeneration."

Orwell chooses five specimen pieces of text, by Harold Laski ("five negatives in 53 words"), Lancelot Hogben (mixed metaphors), an essay on psychology in Politics ("simply meaningless"), a communist pamphlet ("an accumulation of stale phrases") and a reader's letter in Tribune ("words and meaning have parted company"). From these, Orwell identifies a "catalogue of swindles and perversions" which he classifies as "dying metaphors", "operators or verbal false limbs", "pretentious diction" and "meaningless words". (see cliches, prolixity, peacock terms and weasel words).

Orwell notes that writers of modern prose tend not to write in concrete terms but use a "pretentious latinized style," (compare Anglish) and he compares an original biblical text with a parody in "modern English" to show what he means. Writers find it is easier to gum together long strings of words than to pick words specifically for their meaning. This is particularly the case in political writing when Orwell notes that "[o]rthodoxy ... seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style." Political speech and writing are generally in defence of the indefensible and so lead to a euphemistic inflated style. Thought corrupts language, and language can corrupt thought. Orwell suggests six elementary rules that if followed will prevent the type of faults he illustrates although "one could keep all of them and still write bad English."

Orwell makes it clear that he has "not been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing thought." He also acknowledges his own shortcomings and states "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."

Publication

"Politics and the English Language" was originally published in the April 1946 issue of the journal Horizon (volume 13, issue 76, pages 252-265).

From the time of his wife's death in March 1945 Orwell had maintained a high work rate, producing some 130 literary contributions, many of them lengthy. Animal Farm had been published in August 1945 and Orwell was experiencing a time of critical and commercial literary success. He was seriously ill in February and was desperate to get away from London to Jura where he wanted to start work on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The essay "Politics and the English Language" was published nearly simultaneously with another of Orwell's essays, "The Prevention of Literature". Both reflect Orwell's concern with truth and how truth depends upon the use of language. Orwell noted the deliberate use of misleading language to hide unpleasant political and military facts and also identified a laxity of language among those he identified as pro-soviet. In The Prevention of Literature he also speculated on the type of literature under a future totalitarian society which he predicted would be formulaic and low grade sensationalism. Around the same time Orwell wrote an unsigned editorial for Polemic in response to an attack from "Modern Quarterly". In this he highlights the double-talk and appalling prose of J. D. Bernal in the same magazine, and cites Edmund Wilson's damnation of the prose of Joseph E. Davies in Mission to Moscow.

Critical reception

In his biography of Orwell, Michael Shelden, an American professor of English, called it "his most important essay on style" although Bernard Crick, an English politics professor made no reference to the work at all in his original biography, reserving his praise for Orwell's Polemic essays which cover a similar political theme. Terry Eagleton praised its demystification of political language although he later became disenchanted with Orwell.

Introductory writing courses frequently cite this essay.

Connection to other works

Readers can observe Orwell's preoccupation with language in protagonist Gordon Comstock's dislike of advertising slogans in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, an early work of Orwell's. This preoccupation is also visible in Homage to Catalonia, and continued as an underlying theme of Orwell's work for the years after World War II.

A perfect example of this development is the way the themes in "Politics and the English Language" anticipate Orwell's development of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four. One analyst, Michael Shelden, calls Newspeak "the perfect language for a society of bad writers (like those Orwell describes in "Politics and the English Language") because it reduces the number of choices available to them." Developing themes Orwell began exploring in this essay, Newspeak first corrupts writers morally, then politically, "since it allows writers to cheat themselves and their readers with ready-made prose."

See also

• Anglish
• Bibliography of George Orwell
• The Elements of Style
• Fowler's Modern English Usage
• Humphrey Appleby
• Logorrhoea
• LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii
• Obfuscation
• Plain English
• Pleonasm
• Writing style

References

Bibliography

• Hammond, J.R. (1982). A George Orwell Companion. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312324529.
• Rodden, John (1989). The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of "St. George" Orwell. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195039548.
• Shelden, Michael (1991). Orwell: The Authorized Biography. New York: HarperCollins. p. 393. ISBN 0060167092.
• Taylor, D.J. (2003). Orwell: A Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0805074732.

Further reading

• Chase, Stuart (1938). The Tyranny of Words. San Diego,: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 0156923947.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• Chomsky, Noam (2004). Language and Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 074561888X.
• Kress, Gunther (1979). Language as Ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0710002157. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

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