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George Orwell on Clarity in Language |
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Politics and the English Language |
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Simplifying English
I have not here been
considering the literary use of language, but
merely language as an instrument for expressing
and not for concealing or preventing thought.
Stuart Chase and others have come near to
claiming that all abstract words are
meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for
advocating a kind of political quietism. Since
you don't know what Fascism is, how can you
struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow
such absurdities as this, but one ought to
recognise that the present political chaos is
connected with the decay of language, and that
one can probably bring about some improvement by
starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your
English, you are freed from the worst follies of
orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary
dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its
stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
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Political language — and with variations this is
true of all political parties, from
Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to
make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure
wind. One cannot change this all in a moment,
but one can at least change one's own habits,
and from time to time one can even, if one jeers
loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless
phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel,
hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable
inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse —
into the dustbin where it belongs.
1) An interesting
illustration of this is the way in which the
English flower names which were in use till
very recently are being ousted by Greek
ones, snapdragon becoming
antirrhinum, forget-me-not
becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to
see any practical reason for this change of
fashion: it is probably due to an
instinctive turning-away from the more
homely word and a vague feeling that the
Greek word is scientific.
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2) Example: ‘Comfort's
catholicity of perception and image,
strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the
exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion,
continues to evoke that trembling
atmospheric accumulative ginting at a cruel,
an inexorably selene timelessness... Wrey
Gardiner scores by aiming at simple
bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are
not so simple, and through this contented
sadness runs more than the surface
bitter-sweet of resignation’. (Poetry
Quarterly.)
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3) One can cure oneself of
the not un- formation by memorizing
this sentence: A not unblack dog was
chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not
ungreen field.
[back]
By George Orwell, 1946
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