By J. Orwell, 1946
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. Our civilization is decadent and our
language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general
collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a
sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs
to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is
a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
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. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing
the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so
on indefinitely. 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 point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially
written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can
be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of
these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary
first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English
is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I
will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of
what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five
specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially
bad -- I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they
illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a
little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them
so that I can refer back to them when necessary:
1. I am not,
indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not
unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever
more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect
which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold
Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
2. Above all, we
cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes
egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate,
or put at a loss for bewilder .
Professor Lancelot
Hogben (Interglossa)
3. On the one side
we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has
neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for
they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of
consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and
intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally
dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing
but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the
definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is
there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
Essay on
psychology in Politics (New York)
4. All the
"best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist
captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising
tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to
foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own
destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise
to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out
of the crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit
is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious
reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of
the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart
of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British
lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer
Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain
cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the
world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as
"standard English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine
o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly
dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch
braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
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. I list below, with notes and examples,
various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is
habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly invented
metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, 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.
Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the
line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands
of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the
order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used
without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?),
and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is
not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been
twisted out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being
aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes
written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and
the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the
worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never
the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would
avoid perverting the original phrase.
Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at
the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an
appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative,
militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give
grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself
felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc.
The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word,
such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase,
made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such
as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice
is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions
are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by
examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations,
and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of
the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions
are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the
fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis
that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such
resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of
account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious
consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so
forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon,
element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical,
effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit,
utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and
give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives
like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old,
inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process
of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually
takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm,
throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner,
jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de
sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo,
gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and
elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc.,
there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in
the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and
sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or
Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite,
ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and
hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers.* The
jargon peculiar to
Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these
gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of
words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining
a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where
necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind
(deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so
forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The
result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in
† Example: Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely
Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion,
continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel,
an inexorably serene timelessness . . .Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple
bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this
contented sadness runs more than the surface bittersweet of resignation." (Poetry Quarterly)
the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but
are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes,
"The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality,"
while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work
is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference
opinion. If words like black and white were
involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living,
he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many
political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now
no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not
desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic,
realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which
cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy,
not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted
from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic
we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim
that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word
if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a
consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own
private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite
different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The
Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to
persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other
words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly,
are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois,
equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me
give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it
must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of
good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse
from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor
the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men
of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth
to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion
that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be
commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the
unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for
instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen
that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the
sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the
concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve into the vague
phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to
be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable
of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary
phenomena" -- would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and
detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now
analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains
forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of
everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables:
eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first
sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and
chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single
fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a
shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it
is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do
not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops
of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if
you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes,
we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one
from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in
picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order
to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of
words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the
results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is
that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to
say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than
to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't
have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the
rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to
be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry -- when you are
dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech -- it is
natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a
consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a
conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a
sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and
idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague,
not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed
metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these
images clash -- as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the
jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain
that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in
other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the
beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three
words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and
in addition there is the slip -- alien for akin -- making further nonsense, and
several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness.
Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to
write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phraseput up
with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary
and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it,
is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by
reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows
more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes
him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost
parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general
emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with
another -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A
scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least
four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express
it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough
to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it
more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not
obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your
mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will
construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a
certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of
partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that
the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes
clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where
it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of
rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line."
Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The
political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes,
White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from
party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a
fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the
platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial
atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand
shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is
not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly
becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and
turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is
not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone
some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are
coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he
were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he
is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what
he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this
reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable
to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian
purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be
defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face,
and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus
political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and
sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants
driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on
fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions
of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no
more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification
of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the
back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is
called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is
needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian
totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your
opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore,
he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain
features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think,
agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an
unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the
Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in
the sphere of concrete achievement."
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words
falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all
the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a
gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were
instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting
out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of
politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass
of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general
atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. 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.
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. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways
very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves
much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we
should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of
aspirins always at one's elbow. 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. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing
with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt
impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first
sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a
radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a
way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same
time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You
see, he "feels impelled" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has
something new to say -- and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the
bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This
invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a
radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard
against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable.
Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that
language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot
influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions.
So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but
it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared,
not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a
minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave
no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists.
There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of
if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be
possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence*, to
reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out
foreign phrases
*One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by
memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall
rabbit across a not ungreen field.
and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness
unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English
language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what
it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of
obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard
English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is
especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has
outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax,
which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the
avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose
style." On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and
the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every
case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the
fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all
needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In
prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you
think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to
describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you
find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract
you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a
conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and
do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's
meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can
choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best
cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's
words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts
out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions,
and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the
effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when
instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are
used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you
can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep
change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now
fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one
could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the
beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely
language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing
thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract
words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of
political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle
against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought
to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of
language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at
the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst
follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when
you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political
parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure
wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's
own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough,
send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel,
hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse
-- into the dustbin, where it belongs.
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