George Orwell: Politics and the English Language (1946)
alexgolec.github.io
alexgolec.github.io
Other great examples:
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose
Is anyone writing today with that particular quality (i.e. that combination of clarity and directness)? All the candidates I can think of fall far short of it, and only clarify how distinctive Orwell is.
Edit: It's also interesting that this material is now widely seen as classic when at the time it was mere pamphleteering. To my knowledge, Orwell wasn't thought of as a hack—he was respected—but this sort of writing was regarded, even by him, as throwaway work, with a sense that it was too bad that circumstances didn't allow him to do better. (He touches on that in "Why I Write", the first link above.) It's a common theme in the history of art for high-status things to start out as low-status things; this may be a case of that.
Edit 2: Another interesting thing—he was writing this stuff about current events in more or less real time. That's a very murky pond to be looking into. I would very much like to know what it was that gave Orwell that degree of insight.
Orwell said it himself, in Why I Write: he believed he has a "power of facing unpleasant facts".
By all accounts that sometimes made him difficult company. This focus on negativity probably contributed to his bouts of melancholy.
But this power, I believe, came from always putting people first. Unlike most intellectuals he never fell in love with his own intellect, or with the admiration of "honorable" people. Maybe he romanticized the common people a little too much, especially early in his career, but for him it was never an abstraction. I am not sure if there can be any explanation for this. That's just the way he was. He never stayed inside the lines drawn for him, not the traditional ones of class, nor the ones that one might draw around "radical" intellectuals.
So as a policeman in Burma, he got to know the locals and began to understand the horrors of imperialism. Later in life, he traveled to Catalonia to participate in the anarchist revolution as a common soldier, and saw what was beautiful, and ugly, about that. And Orwell saw firsthand how Stalin was engaged in pragmatic and brutal geopolitics, and was not the center of some worldwide proletarian movement.
Anyway, as you can see I'm kind of a fan.
Compare that to someone like Hitchens (who comes to mind because he wrote a book-length homage to Orwell and clearly identified with him), who was more typical (and more shallow) in refusing to concede so much as an atom to his enemies.
Even more remarkable is that Orwell could critique ideology without slipping into "on the one hand, on the other hand" wishy-washiness. If you look at contemporary discourse, that's what nearly everyone who isn't a strong partisan does, and it's a false note of its own.
Somebody today with that kind of directness and clarity would be John Ralston Saul, who advocates writing in clear language. Voltaire's Bastards was written in the 90s and is very much still relevant today.
Steven Pinker is attempting to advocate for more clarity and directness in writing. I think his rather long lecture on MIT video, "Communicating Science and Technology in the 21st Century,"
http://video.mit.edu/watch/communicating-science-and-technol...
has been submitted to Hacker News before. In text, I see Pinker has a shorter work, possibly transcribed from a different lecture, "The Writing Code,"
http://www.thewritingcode.com/pages/transcripts/pinker.html
that discusses what makes writing distinct from speech (Pinker knows this even better than Orwell, as a linguist) and how to revise prose.
As luck would have it, this essay was my test case:
edit: Thanks for the update. Looks really nice.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ireader/ppelffpjgk...
Yours does look a little nicer, though. You should make it an extension.
p { max-width: 30em; }In many ways, it seems like he is talking about memes, just the memes of his own time.
But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of
worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and
are merely used because they save people the trouble of
inventing phrases for themselves.Corporate PowerPoint-talk is the spiritual heir of what Orwell is mocking in his rewrite of the Old Testament passage. An ever-growing wall of "strategic" abstractions and vaguely Latin buzzwords is used to hide the debilitating lack of meaning and power that plagues the days of almost every mid-level manager at any established company.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt
thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation
even among people who should and do know better."What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?"
I wrote a post inspired by Orwell's essay called How Your High School English Teacher is Ruining Your Proposals to vent my frustration over language that obfuscates rather than clarifies, whether intentionally or just due to laziness. (http://www.mimiran.com/proposals/how-your-high-school-englis...)
See the previous submissions: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Orwell...
Obviously, we need to deincentivize that.
"one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin, where it belongs."
The irony being that this is one of the worst kind of cliches, proving that Orwell had no idea what he was talking about.
I spent the next 5 years introducing it to others as a a precursor to any copy-editing sessions.
The irony of this post, of course, is that it decries the evolution of language while praising the evolved parts of the language.
Orwell says, ‘… while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead” (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ This as if dead metaphors simply materialized overnight, and never lived in the middle class. Unsurprisingly, several of the “dying metaphors” he cites are at this point in time essentially dead (Achilles' heel and hotbed, for instance).
He leads with “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.” It's immediately evident, I suppose, that Orwell is a writer, not a scientist. Who is defined as bothering with the matter at all? “Most” is quite the weasel word, isn't it? A case study in phrasing things in a way that you can't really disagree with them. I'm a self-and-by-others-described lover the English language, and misuse and misspelling of words and phrases annoys me as much as text that is too complicated to follow, but I don't think it means the “English language is in a bad way”, any more than it did then. But then I'm simply not one of the “most”, I suppose, by virtue of disagreeing.
“Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.”
Let's grant that the language is declining. Is this assertion really clear? To whom is this clear? It's certainly not clear to me. It isn't clear that either side is true, or that it is false: indeed, the decline, or evolution, as I would put it, of language is likely inextricably intertwined with politics and economics and technological evolution and society.
He addresses this immediately after, saying “But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely”, and in doing so he renders his previous statement pointless, filler, not a meaningless word but a meaningless phrase!
To boot, he says: “Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority.” His hope for curing the language is the conscious action of a minority, but the decline of language cannot be due to the bad influence of a minority?
Orwell makes good points at times here, I think, with respect to overly ornate language that does nothing to clarify its own content. And he gives some reasonable guidelines to boot. But he extrapolates these smaller conclusions to bigger ones that are unlikely to be true, and presents them in a such a way that you don't realize that he's weaseling out of truly concluding anything—he simply postulates. Even when he does make good points about using language to defend the indefensible, the idea that this is some sort of novel discovery that was particularly bad in the 40s—or is now—is unfathomably foolish.
“I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”
What is deterioration, pray tell? What makes a language worse? Did a change in instruments in the second half of the twentieth century make our music worse? Our great musicians? Did the emergence of Ruby or Python make our programs worse? Our programmers? By what metric?
Really investigating the concept of worse or better when it comes to such abstract things as language is incredibly difficult. Distinguishing worse from different is incredibly difficult unless maybe you're comparing two things that were conceived at the exact same moment—and even then, your judgement is specific to the now, not to forever.
“Look back through this essay,” Orwell says self-deprecatingly, “and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.” Conveniently, this makes 90% of the essay immune to criticism. Another weaseling.
“Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists.”
I'm afraid I must report to Mr Orwell that 67 years later, these metaphors are alive and well—or, more likely, dead.
Is our English today “worse” than it was 50 years ago? If not, was it a small cadre of noble writers who saved us? If the decline of language was arrested, was that because the language stopped declining, or simply because on this end, decline doesn't really look like decline—just movement? And if it is worse, then how? All of the complaints he's making seem to be equally valid today, but not particularly more so.
People have been trying to make points without having to really justify themselves for ages, and they will continue to for many years to come. It happens in politics, yes. But it seems that it also happens in essays about politics and the English language.
The irony of this post, of course, is that it decries the
evolution of language while praising the evolved parts of
the language.
What is deterioration, pray tell? What makes a language
worse? Did a change in instruments in the second half
of the twentieth century make our music worse? Our
great musicians? Did the emergence of Ruby or Python
make our programs worse? Our programmers? By what
metric?
[1] http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/01/cory-doctorow-c...
But that begs the question of whether meanings are in fact hidden, or simply changed -- at least as far as language as a whole is concerned[1]. There are of course individual cases where people are, as you point out, incentivized to do all sorts of weird things with language to accomplish some goal. Thus was rhetoric born.
1. Many insults, for example, shed their original sense and persist only as generic attacks. Does that mean that the original meanings are hidden? Or are they simply no longer relevant? Like 'Scumbag': http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28253/origin-of-s.... (Note the several possible etymologies, none of which really bears on its use today anyway.)
>And it seems to me, that objectively there is a incentive for many stakeholders to disguise the inherent meaning of their message, either to appear more disruptive in whichever space they move, or to straight out lie by misunderstanding.
Well said. "To appear more disruptive" is particularly apropos on HN, where 'disruptive' is so perfunctory an adjective as to have lost all meaning (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glittering_generality).
Edit: To Doctorow's point, I doubt that's quite true. In the West at least, solo pieces (particularly piano), quartets and quintets of various kinds (particularly brass and string), and so on have been popular for ages.
One of the major causes happens to be vocabulary. In French, the closest synonymous for belief, "croyance", carries a heavy religious connotation. We have other words, such as "knowledge", "opinion"… but they have other problems. We just don't have a short colloquial word to convey the idea of a probability distribution, and no more.
"No problem, I'll just define the word for her." But I'm not allowed to. I'm supposed to be accessible, which means no long sentences, and no jargon. My trying to be precise comes of as pedantic, pretentious, and needlessly complicated.
And so we're stuck. She doesn't understand what I mean, and I can't explain it to her. Even worse, she actually believes she does understand. Because my words have meanings to her. Just not the meanings I wanted to convey.
---
Regarding solo pieces, quartets, and quintets, you should note that guitar has frets. Playing in tune is much easier compared to say, the cello. While becoming a good guitarist requires just as much effort than becoming a good cellist, merely playing something that sounds cool requires much, much less effort.
Orwell wrote and lived in the context of rising totalitarianism. As in 1984, he saw totalitarianism as a new system that could arise under either capitalism or socialism.
Clearly, he's for the evolution of language's expressiveness but against the evolution of bureaucratic "duck-speak" (to use one of his later phrases).
[Source: Orwell's essay collection, My Country Right or Left]
In this essay it seems to be the a poor signal to noise ratio. Metaphors that have lost the power to move and habits of speech that go against concise expression.
> 'Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.'
I recommend Schopenhauer's essay if you liked this one. Read essays 1-3 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/
> one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some
worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin,
where it belongs.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dustbin%2Cwast...
However, it has be losing in relative rank to 'trash can'. I believe dustbin is far more common in British English than North American English.
The coal scuttle was a de-facto bin, anything that accumulated in there during the day went on the fire. This would also include the newspaper, which would be scrunched up to make a bed for the fire to be lit with.
It was perfectly reasonable to put things like vegetable peelings on the fire too. They might sizzle but they would still be gone.
Milk came in glass bottles that were washed out and collected by the milk man, very few other bottles were used, certainly no sugar drinks in aluminium cans. Tea ruled in England until relatively recently.
There was also the compost heap. So organic matter would go on there, not out of save the world principle, it was just the done thing. You would obviously eat everything you were given so it wasn't as if there were table scraps in the bin.
I don't believe consumers demanded more and more elaborate packaging. Since forever people have complained about excess packaging. It is actually all about cost. Take for example the recycled 'deposit paid' bottles of yesteryear. The glass was quite thick and they weighed quite a bit. Today glass is different, very thin, lightweight and hence cheaper to distribute. I would argue that packaging has became less elaborate - quality bottles of yesteryear have gone, as have proper biscuit tins to take two examples.
So, the dustbin, it wasn't random dust, it was whatever was left over from the fireplace, mostly ash from coal. Britain was an island of coal in a sea of fish in previous times.