Our civilization is
decadent
and our
language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general
collapse.
language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general
collapse.
Orwell
B ookuards
library to the world
POLITICAL WRITINGS OF GEORGE ORWELL
BY: GEORGE ORWELL
CATEGORY: COMMENTARY & OPINION - HISTORICAL
POLITICAL WRITINGS OF GEORGE ORWELL
By
George Orwell
CONTENTS
Essays
• Politics and the English Language
• Why I Write
• Notes on Nationalism
• The Prevention of Literature
Newspaper Columns, Letters and Editorials 1943-1946
• Revising History
As I Please 4 February 1944
• No New Ideas?
As I Please
• Robot Bombs
As I Please, 30 June 1944
• Civilian Bombing
As I Please, 14 July 1944
• "Mv Country. Right or Wrong"
As I Please, 24 December 1943
• Atrocity Pictures
As I Please, 8 September 1944
• Hell
As I Please, 14 April 1944
• Conversation with a Pacifist
As I Please
• Wishful Thinking
Partisan Review, Winter 1945
• The Coming Age of Superpowers
As I Please
• Capitalism and Communism: Two Paths to Slavery
• Ugly Leaders
As I Please
• War Guilt
As I Please
• Revenge is Sour
9 November, 1945
Politics and the English Language
1946
IVlost people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English
language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by
conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our
language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general
collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a
sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to
aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a
natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and
economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that
individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original
cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on
indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,
and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same
thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate
because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it
easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread
by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary
trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think
clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight
against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of
professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that
time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer.
Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now
habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad —
I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate
various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below
the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can
refer back to them when necessary:
1 . I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who
once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become,
out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the
founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski
(Essay in Freedom of Expression )
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of
idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic
put up with for tolerate , or put at a loss for bewilder .
Professor Lancelot Hogben ( Interglossia )
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not
neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they
are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in
the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter
their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural,
irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side ,the social
bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure
integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a
small academic? Where is there a place in this hah of mirrors for either
personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York )
4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and ah the frantic
fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror
at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to
acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of
poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian
organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic
fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the
crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny
and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the
humanization and galvanization of the B. B. C. Timidity here will bespeak
canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of
strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that
of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as
any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be
traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of
Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English. " When the
Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less
ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish,
inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful
mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable
ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of
imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and
cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost
indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of
vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modem
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 henhouse. I list
below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the
work of prose construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a
visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead"
(e. g. iron resolution ) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can
generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes
there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative
power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing
phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the 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 . 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 withouth 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.
Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out
appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra
syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are
render inoperative, militate against, 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 . In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in
preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by
examination o/instead of by examining ). 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. Simple
conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to,
having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the
hypothesis that ; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such
resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of
account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious
consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion , and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun),
objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute,
exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate , are used to dress up a simple
statement and give an aire 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 color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed
fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion . Foreign words
and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien r&eacutgime, 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. 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. 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.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and
literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost
completely lacking in meaning. 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. If
words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and
living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.
Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no
meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable. " The words
democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them
several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the
case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the
attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that
when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the
defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that
they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one
meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.
That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his
hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal
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.
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 modem 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 modem 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.
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 modem 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 modem prose
is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more
closely. 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 modem English. I do not
want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of
simplicity will occur here and there in the worst- written page. Still, if you or I
were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should
probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from
Ecclesiastes. As I have tried to show, modem writing at its worst does not
consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images
in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long
strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of
writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit —
to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say /
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.
When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a
stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into
a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do
well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will
save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale
metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of
leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is
the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a
visual image. When these images clash - as in The Fascist octopus has sung
its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as
certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming;
in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at
the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 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. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he
writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1 . What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1 . Could I put it more shortly?
2. 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.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not
true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing
his private opinions and not a "party line. " Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems
to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in
pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of
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.
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the
familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free
peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious
feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a
feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches
the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no
eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that
kind of phraseology has gone some distance 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 favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian
purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed
be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to
face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the 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. 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 rigors which the Russian
people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the
sphere of concrete achievement.
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.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad
usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and
do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some
ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much
to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should
do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins
always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will
find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting
against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with
conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I
open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have
an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's
social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in
Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative
and unified Europe. " You see, he "feels impelled" to write — feels, presumably,
that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses
answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary
pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases ( lay the
foundations, achieve a radical transformation ) can only be prevented if one is
constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion
of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who
deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language
merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its
development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the
general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in
detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any
evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two
recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned ,
which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of
flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would
interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not
un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the
average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and,
in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor
points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps
it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
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.
Our civilization is decadent and our
language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general
collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a
sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to
aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a
natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and
economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that
individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original
cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on
indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,
and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same
thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate
because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it
easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread
by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary
trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think
clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight
against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of
professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that
time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer.
Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now
habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad —
I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate
various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below
the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can
refer back to them when necessary:
1 . I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who
once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become,
out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the
founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski
(Essay in Freedom of Expression )
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of
idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic
put up with for tolerate , or put at a loss for bewilder .
Professor Lancelot Hogben ( Interglossia )
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not
neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they
are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in
the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter
their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural,
irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side ,the social
bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure
integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a
small academic? Where is there a place in this hah of mirrors for either
personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York )
4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and ah the frantic
fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror
at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to
acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of
poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian
organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic
fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the
crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny
and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the
humanization and galvanization of the B. B. C. Timidity here will bespeak
canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of
strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that
of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as
any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be
traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of
Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English. " When the
Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less
ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish,
inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful
mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable
ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of
imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and
cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost
indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of
vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modem
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 henhouse. I list
below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the
work of prose construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a
visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead"
(e. g. iron resolution ) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can
generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes
there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative
power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing
phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the 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 . 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 withouth 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.
Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out
appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra
syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are
render inoperative, militate against, 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 . In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in
preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by
examination o/instead of by examining ). 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. Simple
conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to,
having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the
hypothesis that ; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such
resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of
account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious
consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion , and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun),
objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute,
exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate , are used to dress up a simple
statement and give an aire 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 color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed
fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion . Foreign words
and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien r&eacutgime, 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. 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. 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.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and
literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost
completely lacking in meaning. 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. If
words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and
living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.
Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no
meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable. " The words
democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them
several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the
case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the
attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that
when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the
defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that
they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one
meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.
That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his
hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal
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.
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 modem 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 modem 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.
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 modem 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 modem prose
is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more
closely. 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 modem English. I do not
want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of
simplicity will occur here and there in the worst- written page. Still, if you or I
were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should
probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from
Ecclesiastes. As I have tried to show, modem writing at its worst does not
consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images
in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long
strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of
writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit —
to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say /
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.
When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a
stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into
a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do
well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will
save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale
metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of
leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is
the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a
visual image. When these images clash - as in The Fascist octopus has sung
its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as
certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming;
in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at
the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 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. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he
writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1 . What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1 . Could I put it more shortly?
2. 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.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not
true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing
his private opinions and not a "party line. " Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems
to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in
pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of
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.
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the
familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free
peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious
feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a
feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches
the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no
eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that
kind of phraseology has gone some distance 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 favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian
purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed
be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to
face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the 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. 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 rigors which the Russian
people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the
sphere of concrete achievement.
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.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad
usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and
do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some
ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much
to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should
do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins
always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will
find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting
against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with
conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I
open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have
an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's
social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in
Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative
and unified Europe. " You see, he "feels impelled" to write — feels, presumably,
that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses
answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary
pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases ( lay the
foundations, achieve a radical transformation ) can only be prevented if one is
constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion
of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who
deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language
merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its
development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the
general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in
detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any
evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two
recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned ,
which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of
flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would
interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not
un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the
average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and,
in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor
points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps
it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete
words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which
must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with
the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has
nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so
long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of
Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style. " On the other
hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written
English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon
word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words
that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning
choose the word, and not the other way around.
library to the world
POLITICAL WRITINGS OF GEORGE ORWELL
BY: GEORGE ORWELL
CATEGORY: COMMENTARY & OPINION - HISTORICAL
POLITICAL WRITINGS OF GEORGE ORWELL
By
George Orwell
CONTENTS
Essays
• Politics and the English Language
• Why I Write
• Notes on Nationalism
• The Prevention of Literature
Newspaper Columns, Letters and Editorials 1943-1946
• Revising History
As I Please 4 February 1944
• No New Ideas?
As I Please
• Robot Bombs
As I Please, 30 June 1944
• Civilian Bombing
As I Please, 14 July 1944
• "Mv Country. Right or Wrong"
As I Please, 24 December 1943
• Atrocity Pictures
As I Please, 8 September 1944
• Hell
As I Please, 14 April 1944
• Conversation with a Pacifist
As I Please
• Wishful Thinking
Partisan Review, Winter 1945
• The Coming Age of Superpowers
As I Please
• Capitalism and Communism: Two Paths to Slavery
• Ugly Leaders
As I Please
• War Guilt
As I Please
• Revenge is Sour
9 November, 1945
Politics and the English Language
1946
IVlost people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English
language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by
conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our
language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general
collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a
sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to
aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a
natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and
economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that
individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original
cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on
indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,
and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same
thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate
because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it
easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread
by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary
trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think
clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight
against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of
professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that
time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer.
Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now
habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad —
I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate
various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below
the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can
refer back to them when necessary:
1 . I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who
once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become,
out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the
founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski
(Essay in Freedom of Expression )
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of
idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic
put up with for tolerate , or put at a loss for bewilder .
Professor Lancelot Hogben ( Interglossia )
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not
neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they
are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in
the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter
their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural,
irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side ,the social
bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure
integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a
small academic? Where is there a place in this hah of mirrors for either
personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York )
4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and ah the frantic
fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror
at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to
acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of
poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian
organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic
fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the
crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny
and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the
humanization and galvanization of the B. B. C. Timidity here will bespeak
canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of
strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that
of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as
any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be
traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of
Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English. " When the
Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less
ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish,
inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful
mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable
ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of
imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and
cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost
indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of
vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modem
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 henhouse. I list
below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the
work of prose construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a
visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead"
(e. g. iron resolution ) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can
generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes
there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative
power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing
phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the 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 . 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 withouth 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.
Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out
appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra
syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are
render inoperative, militate against, 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 . In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in
preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by
examination o/instead of by examining ). 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. Simple
conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to,
having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the
hypothesis that ; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such
resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of
account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious
consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion , and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun),
objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute,
exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate , are used to dress up a simple
statement and give an aire 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 color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed
fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion . Foreign words
and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien r&eacutgime, 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. 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. 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.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and
literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost
completely lacking in meaning. 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. If
words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and
living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.
Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no
meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable. " The words
democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them
several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the
case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the
attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that
when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the
defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that
they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one
meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.
That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his
hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal
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.
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 modem 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 modem 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.
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 modem 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 modem prose
is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more
closely. 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 modem English. I do not
want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of
simplicity will occur here and there in the worst- written page. Still, if you or I
were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should
probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from
Ecclesiastes. As I have tried to show, modem writing at its worst does not
consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images
in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long
strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of
writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit —
to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say /
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.
When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a
stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into
a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do
well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will
save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale
metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of
leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is
the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a
visual image. When these images clash - as in The Fascist octopus has sung
its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as
certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming;
in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at
the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 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. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he
writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1 . What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1 . Could I put it more shortly?
2. 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.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not
true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing
his private opinions and not a "party line. " Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems
to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in
pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of
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.
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the
familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free
peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious
feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a
feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches
the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no
eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that
kind of phraseology has gone some distance 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 favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian
purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed
be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to
face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the 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. 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 rigors which the Russian
people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the
sphere of concrete achievement.
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.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad
usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and
do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some
ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much
to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should
do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins
always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will
find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting
against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with
conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I
open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have
an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's
social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in
Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative
and unified Europe. " You see, he "feels impelled" to write — feels, presumably,
that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses
answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary
pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases ( lay the
foundations, achieve a radical transformation ) can only be prevented if one is
constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion
of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who
deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language
merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its
development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the
general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in
detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any
evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two
recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned ,
which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of
flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would
interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not
un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the
average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and,
in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor
points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps
it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
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.
Our civilization is decadent and our
language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general
collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a
sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to
aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a
natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and
economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that
individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original
cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on
indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,
and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same
thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate
because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it
easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread
by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary
trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think
clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight
against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of
professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that
time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer.
Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now
habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad —
I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate
various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below
the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can
refer back to them when necessary:
1 . I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who
once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become,
out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the
founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski
(Essay in Freedom of Expression )
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of
idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic
put up with for tolerate , or put at a loss for bewilder .
Professor Lancelot Hogben ( Interglossia )
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not
neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they
are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in
the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter
their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural,
irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side ,the social
bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure
integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a
small academic? Where is there a place in this hah of mirrors for either
personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York )
4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and ah the frantic
fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror
at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to
acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of
poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian
organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic
fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the
crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny
and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the
humanization and galvanization of the B. B. C. Timidity here will bespeak
canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of
strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that
of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as
any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be
traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of
Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English. " When the
Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less
ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish,
inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful
mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable
ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of
imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and
cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost
indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of
vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modem
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 henhouse. I list
below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the
work of prose construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a
visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead"
(e. g. iron resolution ) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can
generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes
there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative
power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing
phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the 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 . 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 withouth 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.
Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out
appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra
syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are
render inoperative, militate against, 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 . In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in
preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by
examination o/instead of by examining ). 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. Simple
conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to,
having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the
hypothesis that ; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such
resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of
account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious
consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion , and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun),
objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute,
exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate , are used to dress up a simple
statement and give an aire 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 color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed
fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion . Foreign words
and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien r&eacutgime, 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. 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. 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.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and
literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost
completely lacking in meaning. 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. If
words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and
living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.
Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no
meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable. " The words
democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them
several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the
case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the
attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that
when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the
defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that
they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one
meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.
That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his
hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal
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.
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 modem 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 modem 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.
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 modem 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 modem prose
is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more
closely. 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 modem English. I do not
want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of
simplicity will occur here and there in the worst- written page. Still, if you or I
were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should
probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from
Ecclesiastes. As I have tried to show, modem writing at its worst does not
consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images
in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long
strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of
writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit —
to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say /
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.
When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a
stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into
a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do
well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will
save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale
metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of
leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is
the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a
visual image. When these images clash - as in The Fascist octopus has sung
its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as
certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming;
in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at
the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 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. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he
writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1 . What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1 . Could I put it more shortly?
2. 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.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not
true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing
his private opinions and not a "party line. " Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems
to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in
pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of
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.
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the
familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free
peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious
feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a
feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches
the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no
eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that
kind of phraseology has gone some distance 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 favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian
purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed
be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to
face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the 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. 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 rigors which the Russian
people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the
sphere of concrete achievement.
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.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad
usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and
do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some
ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much
to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should
do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins
always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will
find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting
against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with
conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I
open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have
an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's
social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in
Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative
and unified Europe. " You see, he "feels impelled" to write — feels, presumably,
that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses
answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary
pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases ( lay the
foundations, achieve a radical transformation ) can only be prevented if one is
constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion
of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who
deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language
merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its
development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the
general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in
detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any
evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two
recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned ,
which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of
flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would
interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not
un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the
average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and,
in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor
points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps
it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete
words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which
must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with
the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has
nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so
long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of
Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style. " On the other
hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written
English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon
word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words
that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning
choose the word, and not the other way around.
