Politics and the English Language — George Orwell

Starting question

Essay thesis

Orwell argues that bad language and bad politics reinforce each other. Bad prose is not just ugly; it helps conceal and produce bad thought. > 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. > Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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Fatalism about decline

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Orwell rejects the idea that bad English is inevitable. Fatalism treats language like a natural growth rather than an instrument people shape. > It is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. > Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

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The vicious circle

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Thought and language form a feedback loop. Foolish thought makes language ugly; ugly language makes foolish thought easier. > A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. > But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

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Reversibility

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Bad habits spread by imitation, but they can be avoided. Clear prose is therefore a political act, not just a literary preference. > The process is reversible. > To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.

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Two common faults

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The five specimens share stale imagery and lack of precision. Concrete thought melts into abstract prefabrication. > The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. > Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning.

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Ecclesiastes parody

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Orwell translates a vivid biblical sentence into abstract modern prose to show what is lost: images disappear, syllables multiply, and meaning shrinks. > The concrete illustrations - race, battle, bread - dissolve into the vague phrase success or failure in competitive activities. > The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.

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Ready-made phrases

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Bad prose is easy because ready-made phrases remove the need to choose words or images. > It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else. > They will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent.

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The machine speaker

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Political cliche turns speakers into mechanisms. Familiar phrases allow speech without fresh perception or thought. > One almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. > A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.

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Defending the indefensible

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Political language becomes euphemism because brutal policies cannot be defended plainly without moral shock. > Political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. > Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

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Euphemism as concealment

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Violence is renamed: bombing becomes pacification, forced migration becomes transfer of population, and imprisonment or murder becomes elimination of unreliable elements. > A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.

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Insincerity is the enemy

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The deepest cause of cloudy language is the gap between real and declared aims. > 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.

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Cure by vigilance

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Because bad phrases invade the mind automatically, reform starts with being constantly on guard. > This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases... can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them. > Every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

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What reform is not

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Defending English is not archaism, standard-English policing, fake simplicity, or automatic preference for Saxon words. > It has nothing to do with archaism. > What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.

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Six rules

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Orwell offers practical rules: avoid familiar figures, prefer short words, cut what can be cut, use active voice, avoid needless jargon, and break any rule rather than write barbarously. > Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. > If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. > Never use the passive where you can use the active.

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Rules need attitude

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The rules are elementary, but they demand a deeper change: stop surrendering to fashionable verbal habits and choose words by meaning. > These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude. > One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted.

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Final political payoff

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Simplifying English does not solve politics by itself, but it prevents the worst follies of orthodoxy from speaking through you. > You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. > One can at least change one's own habits.

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Final political payoff

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