Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never us a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.
1946
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Footnotes
1 An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use until recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.
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.