Politics and the English Language
George Orwell
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that theEnglish language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot byconscious action do anything about it. Ourcivilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- mustinevitably share in the general collapse. Itfollows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimentalarchaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is anatural growth and not aninstrumentwhich we shape for our own purposes.
Now,it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political andeconomic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or thatindividual writer. But an effectcan become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effectin an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, andthen 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 theslovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
ModernEnglish, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread byimitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessarytrouble. Ifone gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly isa necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight againstbad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professionalwriters. Iwill come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning ofwhat I have said here will have become clearer.
Meanwhile,here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
Thesefive passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- Icould have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustratevarious of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representativeexamples. I number them so that I can refer back to them whennecessary:
1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that theMilton 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] tothe founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
ProfessorHarold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery ofidioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the basic put upwith for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.
ProfessorLancelot Hogben (Interglossia)
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is notneurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are,are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in theforefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter theirnumber and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, orculturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothingbut the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall thedefinition 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 orfraternity?
Essayon psychology in Politics (New York)
4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the franticfascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at therising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts ofprovocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, tolegalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse theagitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight againstthe revolutionary way out of the crisis.
Communistpamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is onethorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is thehumanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart ofBritain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion'sroar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night'sDream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in theeyes 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 andinfinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the presentpriggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashfulmewing maidens!
Letterin Tribune
Eachof these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidableugliness, 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 heinadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether hiswords mean anything or not. Thismixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic ofmodern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into theabstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are nothackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake oftheir meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like thesections of a prefabricated henhouse. Ilist below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which thework of prose construction is habitually dodged:
Dying Metaphors
Anewly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on theother hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e.g., iron resolution)has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be usedwithout loss of vividness. But inbetween these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which havelost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people thetrouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe theline, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the handsof, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the orderof the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed.
Manyof these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, forinstance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign thatthe writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their originalmeaning without 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 withthe implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never theother way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoidperverting the original phrase.
Operators or verbal false limbs
Thesesave the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the sametime pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance ofsymmetry. Characteristic phrasesare 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.
Thekeynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, suchas break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, madeup of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove,serve, form, play, render. Inaddition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to theactive, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination ofinstead of by examining).
Therange of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ise and de-formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity bymeans of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as withrespect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in theinterests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved byanticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannotbe 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
Wordslike phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective,categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit,exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simplestatement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic,unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, areused to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing thataims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristicwords being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield,buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion.
Foreignwords and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina,mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used togive an air of culture and elegance. Exceptfor the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is noreal need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the Englishlanguage. Bad writers, andespecially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly alwayshaunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, andunnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous,deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gainground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers.
Thejargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, pettybourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.)consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but thenormal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with theappropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation.
Itis often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible,extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the Englishwords that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase inslovenliness and vagueness.
Meaningless words
Incertain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism,it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking inmeaning. Words like romantic,plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in artcriticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do notpoint to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by thereader. When one critic writes,‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality’, whileanother writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is itspeculiar 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 oncethat language was being used in an improper way.
Manypolitical words are similarly abused. Theword Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies‘something not desirable’. Thewords democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice haveeach of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with oneanother. In the case of a word likedemocracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt tomake one is resisted from all sides. Itis almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we arepraising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it isa democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it weretied down to any one meaning.
Wordsof this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, butallows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétainwas a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The CatholicChurch is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent todeceive. Other words used invariable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class,totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
Nowthat I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give anotherexample of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going totranslate 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 thesun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neitheryet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour tomen of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporaryphenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitiveactivities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, butthat a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken intoaccount.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches ofthe same kind of English. It willbe seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaningfairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle,bread -- dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitiveactivities’. This had to be so,because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable of usingphrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’ -- wouldever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
Now analyse these twosentences a little more closely. Thefirst contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words arethose of everyday life. The secondcontains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words arefrom Latin roots, and one from Greek. Thefirst sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time andchance’) that could be called vague. Thesecond contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninetysyllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in thefirst.
Yet without a doubt it is the second kind ofsentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. Thiskind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur hereand 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 onefrom Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing atits worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaningand inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have alreadybeen set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheerhumbug. The attraction of this wayof writing is that it is easy. Itis easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion itis 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 forthe words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentencessince these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.
When you are composing in a hurry -- whenyou 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 mindor a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many asentence from coming down with a bump. Byusing stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at thecost 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 avisual image. When these imagesclash -- as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot isthrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain that the writer isnot seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is notreally thinking.
Look again at theexamples 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 inaddition 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 drakeswith a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving ofthe everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious upin the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitableattitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out itsintended 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 anaccumulation 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 havea general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to expresssolidarity with another -- but they are not interested in the detail of whatthey are saying. A scrupulouswriter, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least fourquestions, thus:
1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will expressit?
3. What image or idiom willmake it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enoughto have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1. Could I put it moreshortly?
2. Have I said anything thatis avoidably ugly?
But you are not obliged to go to all thistrouble. You can shirk it by simplythrowing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughtsfor you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the importantservice of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at thispoint that the special connection between politics and the debasement oflanguage becomes clear.
Inour 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 somekind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitativestyle. The political dialects to befound in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speechesof under-secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are allalike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn ofspeech.
Whenone watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiarphrases --bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoplesof the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feelingthat one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feelingwhich suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker'sspectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behindthem. And this is not altogetherfanciful.
Aspeaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turninghimself into a machine. Theappropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involvedas 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 andover again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is whenone utters the responses in church. Andthis reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any ratefavourable to political conformity.
Inour time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of theindefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, theRussian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, canindeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most peopleto face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the politicalparties.
Thuspolitical language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging andsheer cloudy vagueness. Defenselessvillages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into thecountryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiarybullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed oftheir 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 theback of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is calledelimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name thingswithout calling up mental pictures of them.
Considerfor instance some comfortable English professor defending Russiantotalitarianism. He cannot sayoutright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get goodresults by doing so’. Probably,therefore, he will say something like this:
Whilefreely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which thehumanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certaincurtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitantof transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have beencalled upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concreteachievement.
The inflated style itself is a kind ofeuphemism. A mass of Latin wordsfalls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up allthe details. The great enemy ofclear language is insincerity. Whenthere is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it wereinstinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting outink.
In our age there is no such thing as‘keeping out of politics’. Allissues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions,folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. Whenthe 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 theGerman, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten orfifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
Butif thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people whoshould and do know better. Thedebased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to bedesired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well tobear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always atone's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that Ihave again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.
Bythis morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions inGermany. The author tells me thathe ‘felt impelled’ to write it. Iopen 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'ssocial and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalisticreaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of aco-operative and unified Europe’. Yousee, he ‘feels impelled’ to write -- feels, presumably, that he hassomething new to say -- and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering thebugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay thefoundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if oneis constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes aportion of one's brain.
Isaid earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, ifthey produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing socialconditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkeringwith words and constructions. Sofar as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but itis not true in detail. Silly wordsand expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process butowing to the conscious action of a minority.
Tworecent 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 gotrid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should alsobe possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, to reducethe amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreignphrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousnessunfashionable.
Butall these are minor points. Thedefence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is bestto start by saying what it does not imply. To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging ofobsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standardEnglish’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of everyword or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of noimportance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance ofAmericanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and theattempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to theLatin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that willcover one's meaning.
Whatis above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other wayaround. In prose, the worst thingone can do with words is surrender to them. When yo think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, ifyou want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt aboutuntil you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use wordsfrom the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, theexisting dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense ofblurring or even changing your meaning. Probablyit is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning asclear as one can through pictures and sensations.
Afterwardone can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best coverthe meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words arelikely to make on another person. Thislast effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricatedphrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or aphrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I thinkthe following rules will cover most cases:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you areused to seeing in print.
2. Never us 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 youcan think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so theyare, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used towriting in the style now fashionable. Onecould keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write thekind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of thisarticle.
Ihave not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely languageas an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstractwords are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind ofpolitical quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggleagainst Fascism? One need notswallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the presentpolitical chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one canprobably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
Ifyou simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make astupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
Politicallanguage -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, fromConservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful andmurder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at leastchange one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudlyenough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles'heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump ofverbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.
1946
in Collected Essays,Secker and Warburg, London, 1961
