On the occassion of George Orwell's 100th birthday, please take this opportunity to read this important 1946 essay, and pass it on to your young 'uns. -Al
Politics and the English Language
An essay by George Orwell
Most 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 out 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:
Article comments
1 - Marty
Anyone who reads this long-winded albeit useful essay must be commended. Mind your language!
2 - Luke Welke
George Orwell: Politics and the English language
George Orwell in this essay exposes the abuses of language in the political and journalistic writing of his day. He points out three categories of bad and unethical writing: dying metaphors, operators or false limbs, pretentious diction. Dying metaphors are phrases that have been drained of meaning due to overuse and serve as a substitute for original thought. A writer will use operators and false limbs instead of going to the trouble of coming up with the appropriate verb. Operators and false limbs are connective phrases that bolster an inadequate or weak sentence with a false sense of symmetry. Meaningless words are general terms that have no particular referent, but are loaded with emotional connotations. This article has much relevance to modern political discourse. The language of modern political discourse is rife with meaningless emotional content that manipulates the readers/listeners emotional reaction to what is said. Jargon twists language to usurp rational thought by strapping emotional language into empty rhetoric, it makes allusions to vaguely defined symbols to create mental associations to trigger psychological reactions. If you eliminate the manipulative content in the jargon laden writing that passes for political discourse today, you will find in it, no real factual content. There is no real information that is related to things-in-the-world, it consists of a chain of abstract associations with no real content. Orwell talks about how political writing softens its subject matter to distort the truth. This is more prevalent then ever today. Political rhetoric describes harsh realities in terms that soften their impact on the reader. For instance, they will describe civilian casualties as “soft targets” or “collateral damage”. These terms remove the human element from discourse and replaces it with an abstraction. The more abstract discourse becomes the less involved the general public will be with what is being done in their name. Massively funded think tanks and public relations corporations work tirelessly designing ways of manipulating the public through language and image. Orwell is necessary for this class because he predicted the direction in which the world was heading. By reading his writing we can understand how we are being manipulated and used by elite power. Orwell was a pessimist and saw the future as “a bootheel stamping on the face of humanity forever”. I fear he may have been right.