Politics and the English Language — George Orwell on Writing

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Politics and the English Language — George Orwell on Writing

Corrupt language corrupts

We are taught early in life about the vicious cycle of alcoholism—that people drink to escape despair only to find themselves deeper in misery. George Orwell says that language suffers from a similar affliction. Foolish and wicked thoughts lead to slovenly language, just as slovenly language leads to foolish and wicked thoughts. Language, like alcoholism, can be a self-reinforcing manifestation of our “mental vices”.

Let us take, for example, the language of finance. When interviewer Nicole Salinger asked the economist John Kenneth Galbraith to explain the term “floating currency” to a general audience, his reply was blunt:

“The term is a fraud. Economists and central bankers invented the reference in floating currencies when instability in the exchanges became inevitable… But what was inevitable and inconvenient could be improved by giving it a better name. So, instead of speaking of currency instability or unpredictability or disorder or chaos, the term ‘floating currency’ was invented. The public heard the monetary experts and authorities speaking with wonderful solemnity of the ‘float’ and imagined that they had found something new. They hadn’t. They were in a bad storm and called it atmospheric ventilation.”

J.K. Galbraith and Nicole Salinger. (1978). Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics.

Overwhelming structures

Most will agree, I think, that the language of government, academia, and enterprise remains just as stagnant. Much of their communications, Orwell observes, involve “gumming together long strips of words… and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.” They choose words not for clarity but for convenience—turning lies into truth, horror into virtue, hoaxes into science, and water into wine. Unwilling to face reality, they trade plaintalk for euphemism, and discourse for strawmans.

Indeed, when it comes to euphemisms, we are spoilt for choice. Today, we have “collateral damage”, “extraordinary rendition”, “pacification”, “population transfer”, “alternative facts”, “enhanced interrogation”, “peace-keeping”, “involuntary redundancy”, “public regulatory action”, “corporate restructure”, “voluntary liquidation”, “workplace altercation”, “sexual misconduct”, and so on.

“When the Digital Equipment Corporation eliminated 3,000 jobs its statement didn’t mention layoffs; those were “involuntary methodologies.” When an Air Force missile crashed, it “impacted with the ground prematurely.” [And] when General Motors had a plant shutdown, that was a “volume-related production-schedule adjustment”.

William Zinsser. (1976). On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction.

What we’re grappling with is immense. As Lewis Thomas explains in The Lives of a Cell, human language “is so overwhelming a structure and grows so slowly that none of us can feel a personal sense of participating in the work.” Like the termites in a vast colony, we cannot experience language in its entirety and evolution.

Even as we speak, unseen bureaucrats, lawyers, public relation managers, and their legions of assistants squirrel away, honing their babble and sophistry like an artform. “Once it comes alive, [language] behaves like an active, motile organism”, Lewis notes. “Parts of it are always being changed, by a ceaseless activity to which all of us are committed.” But by the time anything is discernible, we are probably five feet underground as language hobbles along. 

Stale imagery and imprecision

But while language is too vast an enterprise for any one person to move, there’s no reason for us to give in to its “avoidable ugliness”. On this front, like a good doctor, Orwell has a diagnosis and prescription. The problem, he says, is twofold: “staleness of imagery… [and] lack of precision.” So if you find any “dying metaphors”, “meaningless words”, and “pretentious diction”, be sure to cull them.

Meaningless words, in particular, deserve special mention. For one, Orwell chides the art critic who applauds a painting for ‘its living quality’ or ‘peculiar deadness’. True, artistic interpretation is subjective. But what exactly is such a critic trying to say? The critic himself, I suspect, does not truly know. And because he is compelled to say something, only garble bubbles forth.

The scrupulous writer

The “scrupulous writer”, Orwell reminds, has the following questions forever imprinted in his or her mind: “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?… Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?” 

And if all else fails, he proffers six rules to do the heavy lifting:

  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.

The sincere writer

Orwell says that people share “four great motives for writing.” First is “sheer egoism”, or the desire to feel important, respectable, and remembered. Second is “aesthetic enthusiasm”. This is the desire to share something of value or experience. Third is our “historical impulse” or desire to seek truth and amass knowledge. Fourth is “political purpose”, but “political” in the broadest sense. That is our desire to persuade or convince in one form or another. 

Moreover, every writer, speaker, and thinker exhibits these four traits to some degree. Political purpose, in particular, is inescapable. For even the apolitical writer takes a political position by choice. And so it is not surprising to see why our living language today is so muddied. It is woven inextricably into human affairs.

Orwell suggests that “the decadence of our language is probably curable.” But I do not believe him, for scrupulousness alone is insufficient. If political language is to improve, sincerity must enter the core. Here, I agree with Zinsser that the only antidote for a “society strangling in unnecessary words… [and] suffocating language” is humanity, economy, clarity, and warmth through expression. This will be difficult to achieve so long as self-interest and self-preservation remain the prime movers of society. But if we can be just a tad more sincere to one another, perhaps we can, as a collective, begin to speak plainly and think intelligibly.

Sources and further reading

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