Orwell Essay: Politics And The English Language

I love the way he roasts the dying metaphors, spicing their remains with his own novel images:

...like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.

...phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

...gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else...

...an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink.

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow,...

...give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Modern politics consists of framing, soundbites, talking points, context shifting, and statistics. The political essay died along with Orwell's elephant.

This is a great read, especially for anyone who's involved in any sort of "activist" stuff.

I point all my friends who do any sort of political writing - which is mainly things like small local zines and such - at this. It does a great job of showing how to make a point effectively, and showing how a lot of political writing fails to do much of anything but preach to the choir.

Glad to see it on here.

I read this a decade ago, and tried to practice it. The only problem is that people pay less attention because you don't sound as impressive...

OTOH maybe I can recommend it: using this approach, I did win a prize for an essay-based subject (non-computer science)... And there was another essay I wrote that one lecturer gave to another lecturer to read because it was so "stimulating".

BTW: Orwell mentions "dead metaphors". There's a really cool rhetorical device called "reviving a dead metaphor". A simple way to do this is to take mixed (dead) metaphors and unmix them. The impact can be strikingly visceral.

\EDIT {it's all coming back to me now... when I used metaphors in this way, they became true isomorphisms, revealing a much deeper and more informative - and even predictive - correspondence. For an example, note that the desktop metaphor is itself a dead metaphor that is also an isomorphism.}

Finally: Orwell did not do well romantically. It makes one think twice about emulating him. I try to remember this test before following advice :-)

Here's a good collection of Orwell's essays:

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79e/in...

When I first read 'Politics and the English Language', I was pleased to see the similaities between pg's essays and Orwell's thoughts about language, metaphors and good writing.

Looking at my inbox this rings true: The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.

Thats really cool. I had never read that. In doing so, its easy to see now why Orwell created short powerful books. He really was concentrating on his craft and using a systematic approach to his writing.

Thanks for sharing.

For me this is the best article I have read on Hacker News in a while. More of this please!

ps I got a perverse enjoyment from being scolded from beyond the grave.

pps I think that's my first ironic pun

Orwell's diary is being republished in blog form at http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/