Politics and the English Language—a brief analysis George Orwell (abridged)

 

Politics and the English Language—a brief analysis

George Orwell

The English language is at present in a “bad way”.  Many people feel helpless to do anything about it. The decline of a language has political and economic causes, and no individual writer is responsible for the degeneration.

Language becomes “ugly and inaccurate” when thoughts are foolish. The untidiness of the language makes it easy to have silly ideas. Orwell says that “the process is reversible”; we have to get rid of bad language habits and think more clearly.

Orwell, at the outset, provides us with five modern “specimens of the English language." Each has “faults of its own”. They are also ugly. They have two common qualities: “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision”. "The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else."

This “mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose”. Modern prose consists of words chosen not for their meaning. The phrases are “tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse”.

Prose writers adopt different tricks to dodge the difficulties of prose construction.

Dying metaphors.

A newly invented metaphor evokes a visual image. A dead metaphor (e.g. iron resolution) has become a common word. Then there is a "huge dump of worn-out metaphors" with no evocative power. Orwell provides us with several examples: 

 

Ring the changes on, 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, and hotbed. People use them without understanding their proper meaning or turning them out of their original sense.

 

Operators / verbal false limbs. 



These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns and pad each sentence with extra syllables providing an appearance of symmetry. Orwell provides us with examples: 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, 

 

The significant feature here is the elimination of simple verbs that are readily available. [Render inoperative = halt, stop, arrest, disable, Militate against = avert, oppose, reverse, discredit, Give rise to = produce, cause, generate, engender]

 

Additionally, the passive voice is used wherever possible, in preference to the active; noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining), and banal statements get an appearance of profundity through the not un- formation. Orwell laughs at the last-mentioned through a humorous example: "A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field".

 

Pretentious diction. 

 

Pretentious diction dresses up a simple statement and gives "an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements." 

Examples: Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as a noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, and liquidate. 

 

Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, and inevitable--  used to dignify the sordid process of international politics. 

 

Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance.

 

Jargons like a hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard originate from Russian, German, or French. It is easy to create words of this kind than to think up the English words that will cover the meaning. “The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness”.

 

Meaningless words. 

In art/literary criticism, we get “long passages ...almost completely lacking in meaning”. 

 

Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, and vitality (as used in art criticism) are strictly meaningless.

 

The same is true with political words. “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable."

 

Words like democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, and justice have many different meanings (which cannot agree with one another). 

 

After providing a list of “swindles and perversions”, Orwell gives another example of the writing they lead us. He translates a passage from Ecclesiastes into modern English “of the worst sort”. 

 

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 modern 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.

 

Orwell compares the two passages and marks the following points:

 

·      The “concrete illustrations” — race, battle, bread—(of the first) dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities" (in the second). That is not surprising from a modern writer who uses phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena". Moreover, “the whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness”.

·      “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 undoubtedly, it is the second kind of sentence that gains ground in modern English. 

·      Modern writing does not pick out words for their meaning and invent images to make the meaning clearer. It strings together long strips of words. These have already been set in order by someone else. “The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. 

·      With ready-made phrases, we need not hunt about for the words; we also need not bother with the rhythms of the sentences. The “stale metaphors, similes, and idioms” leave the meaning vague but save much mental strain. 

·      “The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image”. By using mixed metaphors—“the Fascist octopus has sung its swan song” — the “writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words, he is not really thinking.”

Orwell points out what a scrupulous writer will do in every sentence he writes. Such a one 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?

Using the ready-made phrase, anyone can shirk that responsibility. The phrases “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”.

Politics and the Debasement of Language.

 

At this point, Orwell explains, “the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear”. It is “broadly true that political writing is bad writing.” It demands a “lifeless, imitative style”. The writing may “vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech”. 

 

When watching some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating phrases like 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. 

 

 “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”. “This reduced state of consciousness… is at any rate favourable to political conformity”.

 

When political speech and writing try to defend the indefensible like “the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan”, the language “has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”. 

 

“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”. 

 

Orwell believes that the German, Russian and Italian languages have deteriorated in the previous ten or fifteen years (because of dictatorship). 

Orwell believes the corruption of language is “curable”.  

 

Some silly words and expressions have disappeared owing to the “conscious action of a minority”. (Two recent examples are: "to explore every avenue" and "leave no stone unturned"). 

 

These expressions disappeared because of “the jeers of a few journalists”. We can also avoid “flyblown metaphors”. 

 

 It is possible to reduce the number of Latin and Greek in the average sentence. We can drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words and make pretentiousness unfashionable”.

 

What is needed to defend the English language?

What is needed is to let “the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around”. In prose, the worst thing is to surrender to words. Probably it is better to “put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations”. But one may need reliable rules. Orwell thinks the following rules will cover most cases:

 

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or another figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

In conclusion, Orwell comments that “political language 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 send some “worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or another lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

[1822]

Dr. S. Sreekumar, 

Retd. Professor of English

Disclaimer 

All the essays in this blog are for the undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indian Universities. They do not substitute the originals.  The students must necessarily go through the original texts. The writer hopes to help the students from the underdeveloped areas of our country.