George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
mtholyoke.edu
mtholyoke.edu
>In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Mistakes were made.
"A bomb exploded near midtown" uses the active but tells us nothing about who was responsible.
If we care about clarity of agency, we should look for it, not poor proxies.
If we want agency to be clearly attributed, we will do better to ask whether agency is clearly attributed than to ask if the passive voice is used. It's what we care about, and it is a determination people are often better at making in the first place.
I do think it is being identified (at least) as an important or effective way of noticing when you are being evasive in your own writing - otherwise why is "the passive is often used to conceal agency" even relevant to the question of improving your writing? And I think to that end, asking the more direct question is better.
“The passive voice, too, has several uses in English. One of them […] is indispensable to classic style: the passive allows the writer to direct the reader’s gaze, like a cinematographer choosing the best camera angle.”
The example he gives -- and I'm sure you can come up with many more -- is,
See that lady with the shopping bag? She's pelting a mime with a zucchini.
versus,
See that mime? He's being pelted with zucchini by the lady with the shopping bag.
And there's this,
“As the linguist Geoffrey Pullum has noted, there is nothing wrong with a news report that uses the passive voice to say, ‘Helicopters were flown in to put out the fires.’ The reader does not need to be informed that Bob was flying one of the helicopters.”
We certainly don't need to care about the agency for every trivial matter, but we certainly should know when clever 'camera angles' are being used by the author to hide an agent in the shadows.
> Orwell was wrong about one thing: that political euphemism was a phenomenon of his time. A century and a half before Orwell, Edmund Burke complained about the euphemisms emanating from revolutionary France:
> "The whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies and circumlocutions for massacres and murder. They are never called by their common name. Massacre is sometimes called _agitation_, sometimes _effervescence_, sometimes _excess_; sometimes _too continued an excercise of a revokutionary power_.
"Regime change"
All involve killing a human being, but euphemisms are used to soften the reality.
If there's brain activity and a beating heart, there's really no scientific basis for saying an unborn human isn't a human being.
This goes back to Orwell's essay. We use euphemisms to soften brutal realities. A war monger may say we're simply bombing "savages", and an abortionist may say we're simply culling a "clump of cells."
Slaves were always completely viable. Bringing them up in a discussion about abortion is a strawman argument.
If you use viability as a guideline, you do bring into the debate people who were viable, but who through disease or accident are no longer viable. Should they be 'abort-able'? I think if the rules around abortion were flexible enough to apply to these people as well, they'd probably be solid enough to satisfy almost everyone's moral and legal sensibilities.
I don't think the line is drawn on the viability spectrum. A baby isn't viable until a month before it comes out of the womb, and that's a stretch. So I don't think this is a matter of people disagreeing with what constitutes viable because there really can't be any debate about that. I would argue that "potentiality" is a better term here.
The arguments, at their core, revolve around the fact that you have two living things who's interests may not be aligned. It's a question of who's interests will be favored.
Now, you can feel what you want about this, I don't want to get into a policy argument, but let's not dance around the issue, abortion is about the conflict between two abhorrent options.
Which is Orwell's point, really. Abortion is death. It also is defensible. But because "killing" is hard and difficult to defend, we come up with euphemistic terms so we can stomach it.
The question is whether the justification suffices. For abortion, the justification is: "Because the mother doesn't want the child, we allow her to kill it in the womb."
Abortion is one such case.
EDIT 'effect/affect' fix
Shell shock almost sounds like the bombs themselves. SHELL SHOCK. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and all the humanity has been ripped out of it.
Whereas "Operational Exhaustion" sounds very soft and innocent.
~How about "mission resilience depletion"? That makes it seem more like they just forgot to recharge the batteries in their mobile phones. Or "norepinephrine-cortisol disruption syndrome", which makes it sound more like they haven't been taking their pills at the correct dosage.~
/s
I think removing the humanity from these words is part of the point, because people are naturally judgmental, if they hear "Operational Exhaustion" they think "Oh, just tired then", not that there is a medical issue. You can't use "mentally challenged" as an insult precisely because it's had the humanity sucked out. Assuming that a term having "humanity" means for it to have emotional connotations.
Words are stretched and tortured such that it's difficult to immediately derive the meaning, which again is the point, to get you to use your logical brain rather than your more emotional lizard brain.
His list of worn-out metaphors understood by few, "ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, 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, hotbed" is still apt. "Ring the changes" is misused in today's South China Morning Post.[1] My own favorite is "free rein", which is a horse term. (One not used by riders today; riders say "loose rein".) It often appears today as "free reign".
Today's metaphors come from popular culture rather than the classics, and age faster. This may not be an improvement.
[1] http://www.scmp.com/sport/rugby/article/2002459/mark-coeberg...
This is interesting info. It explains why Orwell was in a position to notice and call out.
Reading Orwell's own writing in this article "like tea leaves caught in the sink" it conjures up a fresh mental image.
One thing I discovered during 6 years of living in central Europe is that speaking mostly with non-native English speakers leads to a necessary elimination of metaphors; you have to use direct words. I can't say "he's trying to pull the wool over your eyes" or "don't let the cat out of the bag" or whatever, because nobody has any idea what I'm saying, and it's not worth explaining. I considered it a kind of mental training, it taught me to speak plainer English.
This is a fair summary of the problem with clichés. But as readers we share responsibility for this: if we were to read less casually and more critically, we would identify the metaphor on both levels, and increase our own understanding and experience.
That makes his use of Newspeak especially interesting, because it was through Newspeak that the government in "1984" circumlocuted. I guess he became disillusioned with the idea that Basic English was impervious to circumlocution.
[1] https://people.ucsc.edu/~pullum/MLA2004.pdf
[2] https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/lit/cha...
The strength of this recommendation seems like it should be diminished by the fact that I've only ever read one review of a dictionary, but I defy anyone to produce a better one. If you can, though, I definitely want to read your candidate.
> Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
> 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.
"Competitive activities" sounds like it refers to artificial, structured activities made for the purpose of measuring ability, so just like you say the correlation should be strong. In those activities, people work hard to make sure the competitors don't cheat, that the rules are fair, and so on.
However, the first paragraph is not about artificial competitions but about natural, chaotic situations. It's about victory in a chaotic battle or acquiring wealth back when capitalism hadn't been invented yet. Basically it means "life is unfair, sometimes".
To take a concrete example, 9/10 startups fail (or something like that, I'm sure someone has the correct ratio). Does that mean that 9/10 founders are innately unfit to found a company? It seems much more likely that success is a combination of getting the right people working on the right project at the right time in the right place and being noticed by the right people. Even the well educated, connected, entrepreneurial founder might fail because of any one of those (or other) factors.
The first paragraph explains this concept succinctly and beautifully. The fact that the second does not convey this meaning while technically containing the same information, is the point of this article.
If anything, I wish that the phenomenon Orwell is describing would be used by the people on the "right" side more often--but people who are doing what they think is right don't as often feel the need to obfuscate it for PR purposes.
Ultimately I think understanding the phenomenon Orwell describes is fundamental. You should be able to read "Two died after a shooting incident involving LAPD officers" and know to look further to discover that meant "LAPD shot and killed two unarmed black men". But actually following Orwell's advice on how to write puts you at a disadvantage. Playing by the rules when your opponents aren't is a fool's game.
Many of the best communicators in history successfully employed "simpler" verbal constructions than those Orwell rails against.
Then why are all the most popular news sources full of clickbait, inflammatory headlines, and cliffhanger hooks?
> Many of the best communicators in history successfully employed "simpler" verbal constructions than those Orwell rails against.
History is written by historians, and historians are biased toward things that interest them. Simpler verbal constructions might get written about more by an educated historian, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were the most influential in their time.
Also, realize that people writing NewSpeak have gotten better at it since Orwell wrote this.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1950...
"No man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations, and of kings, sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them."
The neologisms from FOX and social justice warriors are politics of language.
Now, is SJW politics of language? Arguably yes.
I would suggest not using one-off examples that you gave if you're wanting to paint a broader picture, or use it as a basis for a set of foundational principles.
But regardless, I would like an example of what "SJW's" words and statements are being used as thought-terminating cliches in true Orwellian fashion. I'd also like to know why you consider using such terms as "SJW" to be exempt from that (presumably). If "SJW" is politics of language, and you say it arguably is, then why did you employ such terminology in a post about not employing such rhetoric?
I gave you an example of SJW's who regard the "patriarchy" as a threat more significant than the free speech of the men who were trying to have a meeting. In other words, they valued "social justice" more than freedom. I feel you ought to address this before asking for another example.
People read Animal Farm's denunciations of the founding of the USSR and confuse his anti-Soviet stance with an anti-socialist stance. He was disillusioned with the behavior of the Russian communists during the Spanish Civil War, which really turned him against them.
(The anti-fascist coalition was broadly anarchist, with a smattering of foreign, communist, socialist and other forces. Despite being <5% of the total coalition, the Russian communist government refused to provide material aid unless their forces were put in charge, which the coalition declined. Since the western governments (Britain, France, US) refused to help at all, the anti-fascist forces had no support, and were overwhelmed by Franco, ushering in decades of fascism in Spain.)
but the examples you gave of political views were "Far Left" "Fox News" "Social Justice Warriors" whereas George Orwell would be concerned about how the seemingly staid mainstream's use of political language. 'smart bombs' 'neutralize target' 'pacification [of Vietnam]' etc are all vocabulary promulgated by establishment politicians and mainstream newspapers and vastly more dangerous than what "social justice warriors" try to foist.
But how much of the badness is really unique to the English language, or to the modern world?
My guess is that all times and places have wallowed in mushy rhetoric, and always will. If we look back at Pericles or Cicero or Jefferson and see better verbiage, that's because we are selecting for it.
Does anybody know if this has been (properly) studied? It's not quite so obvious that succinctness is good for readability and comprehension, and I think it could also go the other way.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Bear in mind, it is quite possible that Orwell meant what he said (in the direct, plain meaning of it), and got it wrong.
Maybe it's a pet peeve, but I loathe advice of the form "do just the right amount of a thing" that doesn't say how one is to determine the "right" amount. After all, if that was the easier part of following the advice, one wouldn't need the advice in the first place.
http://i.somethingawful.com/u/garbageday/2013/goldmine/4word...
A fun exercise that illustrates Orwell's point, when reading a sentence, see how much you can reduce it without losing its original meaning. For instance, I frame your question as follows:
"Do we know if this has been studied? It's not obvious that succinctness is better for readability and comprehension. It might be worse."
You can think of this as the writer's version of code golf.
I love how meta this sentence is :)
Ironical, given that verbiage itself means excess.
The content is.. often very debatable. But I think the style and presentation are so good they should be studied in schools.
;)
> As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry -- when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech -- it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
To me it's a funny, semi-serious connection. I see many Javalanders are very happy with Java, and have been for quite some time. For them it's easier, and quicker once they're in the habit, to fire up Eclipse (or IntelliJ), autocomplete and autorefactor and glue together this and that without having to think much (hey tests are green!), sling giant names and namespaces around dozens of files and directories up and down various call stacks in and out of giant systems like Spring and Hibernate, a few even try to match large programming patterns to everything... Yet still they frequently fail to convey in code just what exactly is actually happening. In many cases they just needed a few functions in a file or two with concise names that can be remembered and typed without assistance, even written faithfully on paper without having to use shorthand.
(I don't believe it was in his book 'Why Orwell Matters', but maybe it was.)
Hitch is possibly best known now as a vocal anti-theist, but his writings on language (mis-)use are delightful pieces.
I'd also agree with Geoff Pullum's characterization of it as "a smug, arrogant, dishonest tract full of posturing and pothering, and writing advice that ranges from idiosyncratic to irrational" (http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/04/04/eliminati...)
But apart from it being a very poor source of writing advice, I don't believe it's accurate in its diagnosis of how language is deployed for political ends—the question is a much more complicated one than he claims here.
There exist actual good books that can teach you how to write better, instead of patting you on the back and allowing you to tut-tut at those plebians who write things that are "outright barbarous". Pinker's The Sense of Style is one of those; Ann Lamott's Bird by Bird is another. There also exist much better (and more accurate and scientific) resources about how language actually affects the way we think about things. Benjamin Bergen's Louder than Words is an excellent start, and virtually anything from Lakoff's long list of publications is worth reading—Metaphors We Live By is the classic, but Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things in particular is excellent from his more recent work.
> “Big Brother” and “doublethink” and “thought police” are frequently cited as contributions to the language. They are, but they belong to the same category as “liar” and “pervert” and “madman.” They are conversation-stoppers. When a court allows videotape from a hidden camera to be used in a trial, people shout “Big Brother.” When a politician refers to his proposal to permit logging on national land as “environmentally friendly,” he is charged with “doublethink.” When a critic finds sexism in a poem, she is accused of being a member of the “thought police.” The terms can be used to discredit virtually any position, which is one of the reasons that Orwell became everyone's favorite political thinker. People learned to make any deviation from their own platform seem the first step on the slippery slope to “1984.”
And:
> Orwell wrote many strong essays, but “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946, is not one of them. Half of the essay is an attack on bad prose. Orwell is against abstractions, mixed metaphors, Latinate roots, polysyllabic words, clichés, and most of the other stylistic vices identified in Fowler's “Modern English Usage” (in its fourth printing in 1946). The other half is an attack on political dishonesty. Certain political terms, Orwell argues, are often used in a consciously dishonest way. ... Fowler would have found nothing to complain about, though, in the sentences Orwell objects to. They are as clear as can be. Somehow, Orwell has run together his distaste for flowery, stale prose with his distaste for fascism, Stalinism, and Roman Catholicism. He makes it seem that the problem with fascism (and the rest) is, at bottom, a problem of style. They're bad, we are encouraged to feel, because their language is bad, because they're ugly.
> This is not an isolated instance of this way of thinking in Orwell. From his earliest work, he was obsessed with body odor ... Smell has no relation to virtue, however. Ugliness has no relation to insincerity or evil, and short words with Anglo-Saxon roots have no relation to truth or goodness. Political speech, like etiquette, has its codes and its euphemisms, and Orwell is right to insist that it is important to be able to decipher them. He says that if what he calls political speech—by which he appears to mean political clichés—were translated into plain, everyday speech, confusion and insincerity would begin to evaporate. It is a worthy, if unrealistic, hope. But he does not stop there. All politics, he writes, “is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” And by the end of the essay he has damned the whole discourse: “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.” All political parties? Orwell had sniffed out a tendency.
It's a great, thoughtful piece, I recommend reading the whole thing.
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/27/honest-decent-w...
And indeed he does.
And, sad enough, nowadays we are full of rhetoric.
But still, it would be nice if "Orwelianism" meant "Adhering to the principles of George Orwell in encouraging critical thinking and considered reasoned observation" and if it became a school of political thought... alas, all good ideas are corrupted in the end, but human progress walks on the stepping stones of ideologies, and it seems we've had nothing but nasty ones for a very long time.
Whereas an ideology requires a dogma: a set of things that are not questioned.
That's already called rationalism and/or empiricism. Why does it need a surname attached to it? It would only obscure the meaning. I think Orwell himself would not be pleased; he very much argued in favour of expressing yourself clearly. I think he has even wrote some kind of essay about it, but I can't recall the title.
I think Orwell has a lot of the traits that made people like Marx idols. A good chunk of his writing is actually instruction. And he has a lot of fans, but no fanatics. I merely find it curious that Orewlianism isn't an ideology.
I did take an extra step and pondered wether it would be a good thing, but that's a throw away thought.
That's interesting, could you post a source (if Bible, the book and verse?)
People who support odious policies and want to see them enacted can't do that, so they have to weasel-word it.
It's particularly a hit amongst center-left liberals who are emboldened into feeling like they are very righteous by not doing anything at all. The more accurate observation comes from commenter Mark F:
> The reason Orwell's essay makes some people angry is that it depicts violations of stylistic rules as moral violations. Use the passive, it says, and you are playing into the hands of the totalitarians. I think that's also why some people like it; people can feel like they're defending the cause of freedom by writing concisely.
> I tend to side with the former camp. I think people pick up on cant pretty well without his help, except when it's telling them something they already want to believe. And in the latter case his help is no use.
There's a kind of person out there who really likes George Orwell, Steven Pinker, David Foster Wallace, Christopher Hitchens, etc. which all pander to a political sensibility that is very self-congratulatory about inaction, and consistently says "things are fine, don't rock the boat, you'll make things worse".
It's ironic that on HN, critics of Orwell's work are said to be "your typical critics", but really, it's Orwell and Pinker and co. that consistently push/pushed out tracts that are critical takedowns of third parties. So their readers are now smugly self-satisfied twice over: once when agreeing with the authors, once while dismissing their critics.
I struggle with the language of women's rights, for instance. I think about Orwell when I hear 'mansplaining' for example. Yet, at the same time I often see challenges that are unique to women.
This is pedantry. All language is metaphorical at some level. 'Vagina' literally means 'sheath'. Should we avoid that one? How about describing an argument as 'crystalline'? I would argue that 'collapse' in that sense is no more metaphorical than crystalline.
a) the comment section goes more in depth
b) it's not the only LanguageLog post/author taking down Orwell, it's just the first that comes up on google
c) as pedantic as the criticisms are, it just so happens that so are Orwell's, so it's about as good as you need to be to criticize this essay.
Not in English it doesn't.
This statement refutes your attempt to claim particular words are metaphorical.
Case in point: Orwell uses passive constructions 40% more frequently than than an average English corpus. This essay is full of them. Language Log did a brilliant analysis of the essay's towering inaccuracy and hypocrisy:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992
---
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
And wouldn't you know it, the very first sentence of Orwell's essay runs:
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.
---
His rules are bullshit, and he knew it, which is why he was smart enough to ignore them completely.
I feel like this is something the HN audience should be familiar with. At least I personally know a lot of guidelines for creating maintainable software, but there are a host of conditions which will cause me to bypass them anyway.
There's a difference between grammatical correctness, journalistic conciseness, and social register.
The "long" sentence is an example of the latter - it tells the reader something about the writer, and it uses stock cliches that make it more appealing to one particular social group.
Writing can be as much about social signalling and persuasion as plain content and grammar.
If you want to see English that completely fails to follow the rules, and is even more about social signalling than content, try this letter:
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetarypolicy/Documents/pdf/...
> Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
So perhaps you could cut out the insults and bad language, it's only advice after all.