George Orwell - Politics and the English Language

I can never keep up with Language Log, and 3 grafs into this I have to say that this post is fantastic, and absolutely justifies the re-re-re-re-post of this essay on HN. Thank you!

There was an interesting, non-fawning (and less sputtering than the LL post) piece on Orwell and some of his work by Julian Barnes in the NY Review of Books earlier this year.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22414

Orwell himself says,

"Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against."

So he is not claiming that he has attained perfection in his own prose. But he is not after perfection. He just wants to encourage us to write better.

I don't agree with this linguist. All he does is torture the meaning of the rules and torture logic in order to squeeze out some kind of inconsistency from Orwell's essay.

I must say, calling Orwell’s essay a “language crime” is more than a bit overblown. This blog post’s “jibes” miss the essay’s spirit, and Orwell’s playful (often ironic) tone, and thereby misread its substance, I think. The Language Log author completely ignores the terrible examples that Orwell calls out, and the entire premise of the article, in his rush to nitpick Orwell’s prose and “prove” him a hypocrite. I’ll quote Orwell’s essay here, because this is the essential bit:

> 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. As

> soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the

> abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are

> not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the

> sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together

> like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

Orwell quite skillfully analyzes several of the most common problems with political prose, describes how they operate, and their pernicious effect. His rules are not designed to be rock solid prescriptions, but something more like guidelines or heuristics. The goal, with political speech and writing, as with most expository prose, should be to make imagery concrete, and language precise, because the goal should be to make the author’s plain meaning understood, rather than obscuring it in a vague and meaningless haze.

The blog author’s “logical” analysis of his final rule is the most particularly stupid. Orwell’s plain meaning is clear: “do not take these rules as dogma, and break them where necessary to write clear and stylish prose.” Instead, the author tries to apply an odd mathematical rigor to show that the caveat is somehow vacuous. But consider: if that final rule was removed, would the essay actually be saying the same thing? No. Is this final warning actually self-contradictory? Not really. It’s Orwell’s apparently too subtle way of contradicting the seeming strictness of the previous rules, pointing out that the device was meant for rhetorical effect rather than to demonstrate firm conviction. (Think about it, if Orwell had said “sometimes passive sentences are less clear than active ones,” the reader could equally call him out for indecisiveness.)

In conclusion: meh, a pretty weak language-lawyer analysis, especially for its premise that Orwell is being too language lawyerly. Orwell’s prose where he “breaks” his rules remains clear, concise, and stylish – obviously said rules can be broken without yielding awful language. So what? Using said “rules” to examine prose makes a decent start at identifying some of its problematic passages. An author consciously considering all of those “rules” while writing may decide to break some of them sometimes, but will also (at least in my personal experience) catch sloppy phrases and sloppy reasoning, and write tighter, clearer prose.

Despite outward appearances, Orwell is not making one of those prescriptivist rants that you sometimes see from people who don't know how language evolves. What Orwell is talking about is deeper. His essay more about style rather than grammar, which means it's not really taking part in the (de- vs pre-)scriptivist debates in the first place. However, it goes the extra mile in using examples to show how pointlessly fluffy prose is simply worse at communication, because it either obscures the point, or (he implies) causes a point never to exist in the first place because it promotes wooly thinking.

Yeah, his essay makes some rookie mistakes, like complaining about recent decline and using the passive voice. He's still correct, in general. He's not stating rules of grammar or trying to lay down any sort of law, he's posting a couple of helpful pointers for getting your point across, which emphasis precision and clarity over appearing educated.

I think the biggest indication that that critique is ill-founded is that it doesn't start with "well, it's kinda long," because that's the biggest hypocrisy I detect. What is really comes down to, is that an essay that's really about prose and composition shouldn't be analyzed as if it's about linguistics, even when it happens to have "language" in the title by stroke of ill fortune.

I'm not sure whether this essay gets posted because of its advice on the use of language or merely for the following, continuously relevant, observation:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The implication is that when you use language in the way we often see politicians, the PR department, etc. do, then they are not only guilty of using inaccurate language: they are probably also guilty of having inaccurate thoughts. You should worry about using inaccurate language, because it may mean you are having inaccurate thoughts; a vicious circle.

He likely means "foreign" in a more classical sense: Orwell tends to favor Anglo-Saxon derived words over Norman French-derived words. "Freedom" rather than "liberty", for instance. This is a reaction to the centuries-old stigma against Anglo-Saxon derived words as being crude or inelegant.

That's an interesting question. But unfortunately for Orwell, programming is geared greatly towards reuse. So software "cliches" are valued, if they are effective.