George Orwell – Politics and the English Language (1946)

I loved this when I first read it in high school, mostly because it mocked academic english for relying on pretentious jargon to obfuscate itself.

My second reading years later, the whole thing felt very pretentious itself, if not downright authoritarian. Orwell acknowledges at the beginning that his view might seem like "sentimental archaism", but properly enforced, archaism isn't just sentimental, it's oppressive. Wanting things to remain the same, or revert to the way they were before is, after all, a serious condemnation of everyone fighting for progress along the way.

Reading it a third time today, and reading it as a tech worker, I'm drawn to his note that "effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form" as it relates to technologies as new mediums for communication. For Twitter to establish 140 characters as the length of a tweet is also to establish it as the length of a though, which in time makes tweeting the perfect way to broadcast thoughts.

I don't want to sound too conspiratorial here, I don't think any given medium is bad. I also don't want to sound too inane and suggest that the only important take way is the basic idea of McLuhan's Medium-as-Message.

I do think it's useful to think of the battle of dominance in medium as a battle for dominance in message, and accept that victory may be as self-perpetuating as it is self-normalizing.

EDIT: You might also enjoy DFW's related essay: http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsag...

Politics and the English Language is a pretty seductive essay, but on deep examination, it doesn't really make its own case beyond some sentimental appeals and rhetorical flourishes. In particular, its thesis seems to be language has "declined", but never cites any older uses of language save a line of the Bible, which he contrasts with bureaucrat-ese and journalistic writing; he makes rough insinuations that the language can somehow affect (or even effect) thought but doesn't bother justifying how or why beyond simple rhetorical devices ("But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought [citation needed]"); he insists on a few rules to keep your language sharp, but these rules are ridiculously broad and, indeed, so hard to follow while producing clear writing that he breaks most of them himself within the first two paragraphs: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992

The idea that you can adopt simple rules and somehow come up with speech that's not amenable to deception or fluffery is appealing for obvious reasons, but that's just not how language works: you can follow Orwell's rules to the letter, better than he does, and include just as much deceptive fluff; or you can ignore his rules and write forceful, interesting prose. (Orwell himself does!)

A rough analogue in the programming field would be the idea that you can "enforce" good code by nothing more than enforcing style guidelines. The idea that you can prevent lies in politics by banning the passive voice is roughly as silly as the idea that you can prevent bugs in code by banning tab characters.

Orwell had a job with the British Ministry of Information during WWII. Part of his job was translating news reports into 850-word Basic English [1] for radio broadcasts to the Colonies. (India, mostly.) Once you know that, this essay, and "1984", make more sense. Orwell discovered that translating into Basic English is a political act. The evasions and prevarications of official statements do not translate. Ambiguity has to be hammered out first to fit into the forced plain style of Basic English. Hence, Newspeak.

His list of overused phrases is dated. A few to avoid today:

- "very unique". "Unique" means there's only one. If there's more than one, "unique" is the wrong word.

- "a lot". Overused, but harmless.

- "literally". Avoid unless "literally" is true; do not use for emphasis.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Basic_English_word_l...

This has had significant discussion before, including 6 months ago:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=George%20Orwell%20%E2%80%93%20...

One of the worst things about Orwell's prescriptivist tone is how he steadfastly refused to assume that any of his advice applied to himself. And that's a good thing. His advice if followed would make anyone a less interesting, more lumpen and bland writer. Thankfully Orwell payed no attention to his own advice when writing.

Do as he does, not as he says, in this case.