Politics and the English Language [1945]
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Political language [...] is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Was Orwell right that "political chaos is connected with the decay of language"? Of course he was, so profoundly and depicting it so vividly in 1984 that the English language itself conferred the highest possible honor and adopted his name as the word for it.
That's his negative point. His positive is that "one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end". Hardly the voice of a style nanny.
What Orwell is trying to teach us is this: Cultivate simple language to get yourself out of the habits of obfuscation and evasion. Then you will have a better chance of seeing monstrosities like "mistakes were made" and "enhanced interrogation techniques" for what they are. The heuristics he suggests are obviously just rules of thumb. That he breaks them in the very essay that proposes them is perfectly consistent with his purpose.
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
2. Use short words.
3. When it is possible to cut a word, do.
4. Be active.
5. Hold off on loanwords.
6. Hang the sticklers.
1. Avoid common metaphors.
2. Write fewer, shorter, simpler words.
4. Choose the active voice.
[edited, see reply]. I enjoy the "say it in fewer words" game, but quite a lot has been lost between the original essay and this sort of summary. As a reminder, it might work, presented to a fresh reader, I doubt if it would.
You want 'active voice'. Tenses distinguish time, voices distinguish subjects from recipients of action (in English; in other languages there's also a middle voice), moods distinguish the manner in which a verb describes an action (is it a command, a wish, a statement of fact etc.).
Pretty sure this is written in the passive voice.
(The New York Times book review didn't call it "the turgid, self-righteous and philosophically hopeless ‘Politics and the English language’" for nothing.)
No.
> (The New York Times book review didn't call it "the turgid, self-righteous and philosophically hopeless ‘Politics and the English language’" for nothing.)
Perhaps not, but I bet they supported that assessment with something more deliberate than a hand-wave to authority.
It's an imperative. A passive changes a word like "use" or "used" into "was / is used".
"He used a passive" becomes "A passive was used".
"He will use a passive" becomes "A passive will be used".
"Never use a passive" becomes "A passive should never be used".
The point of a passive is it obscures (or de-emphasises) the person who is doing something. It's used by scientists to sound more impartial "I derived an equation" becomes "an equation was derived". In some cases, the actor isn't important, but it's often just used to make it sound like all due process was followed (by the person who's trying to avoid getting blamed).
And yes, I just used a passive.
Or, as Orwell says:
> 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.
Emphasized is in the passive voice; all of it is too long.
If this is true, then everything I have read and witnessed firsthand about the way culture works, tells me the US is doomed politically.
"Let us assume that you are breaking the sixth rule itself. Then a fortiori (pardon my Latin) you can't be failing to break any of the rules sooner than saying something outright barbarous. Which means, contra assumption, that you aren't breaking the rule after all. Doh!"
Pleeease, isn't it bloody obvious that the 6th meta-rule does not count?