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George Orwell on Clarity in Language |
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Politics and the English Language |
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A move away from concreteness
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.
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