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 language's untidiness makes it easy to have silly ideas. Orwell feels ‘the process is reversible’; we must avoid ‘bad’ language habits and think more clearly.

Orwell provides us with five modern ‘specimens of the English language.' Each has faults. They are also ugly. They have two common qualities: ‘staleness of imagery’ and ‘lack of precision’. ‘The writer… 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 employ various tricks to avoid 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 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 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 that provide (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. [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 try 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, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, and White Guard originate from Russian, German, or French. It is easier to create words of this kind than to think of English words that will cover the meaning. However, that results in increased '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 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, patriotism, realism, 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). We expect this from a modern writer who uses expressions like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’. Modern prose tends to move 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 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 (with) its ninety syllables, it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet undoubtedly, it is the second kind that gains ground in modern English.

·       Modern writing does not pick out words for their meaning and invent images to make the meaning clear. It strings together long strips of words already set in order by someone else. The attraction of this way of writing is its ease.

·       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....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 clear?
• 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?

 

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 ....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 sounds are coming from his larynx. However, 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-- “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.... real and.... declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink”.

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

(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 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.

 [1743]

Revised on 28/01/26

Dr. S. Sreekumar, Retd. Professor of English, Govt. Arts College, Coimbatore-18.

Disclaimer 

All the essays in this blog are intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indian universities. They are meant to provide guidance and do not substitute for the original texts. Students must make sure to read the original works. The writer hopes to support students from underdeveloped areas of our country.