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.
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.