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George Orwell on Clarity in Language |
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Politics and the English Language |
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The debasement of language
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.
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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 phrase put 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: 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? And he will probably ask himself
two more: Could I put it more shortly? 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. The 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.
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