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George Orwell on Clarity in Language |
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Politics and the English Language |
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Insincere language and its uses
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 colour, seems to
demand a lifeless, imitative style. The
political dialects to be found in pamphlets,
leading articles, manifestos, 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.
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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 favourable to
political conformity.
In our time, political speech
and writing are largely the defence 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. Defenceless 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.
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