
George Orwell: Politics and the English Language (1946) - yk
http://alexgolec.github.io/orwell/politics
======
gruseom
The more I read Orwell's essays of the 1940s the more they seem like a master
class in how to write, which means they are also a master class in how to
think. The combination of clarity and impact in his style is so powerful that
it's actually shocking. Moreover, it seems to be aging very well, so Orwell's
reputation (specifically for this) has been steadily increasing.

Other great examples:

[http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw](http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw)

[http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose](http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose)

Is anyone writing today with that particular quality (i.e. that combination of
clarity and directness)? All the candidates I can think of fall far short of
it, and only clarify how distinctive Orwell is.

Edit: It's also interesting that this material is now widely seen as classic
when at the time it was mere pamphleteering. To my knowledge, Orwell wasn't
thought of as a hack—he was respected—but this sort of writing was regarded,
even by him, as throwaway work, with a sense that it was too bad that
circumstances didn't allow him to do better. (He touches on that in "Why I
Write", the first link above.) It's a common theme in the history of art for
high-status things to start out as low-status things; this may be a case of
that.

Edit 2: Another interesting thing—he was writing this stuff about current
events in more or less real time. That's a very murky pond to be looking into.
I would very much like to know what it was that gave Orwell that degree of
insight.

~~~
swordswinger12
If you're like me and prefer reading print books, there's an excellent (and
very comprehensive) collection of Orwell's letters, essays and journalism.
It's slightly difficult to track down but worth the effort.

[http://www.godine.com/search.asp?search=orwell](http://www.godine.com/search.asp?search=orwell)

~~~
dionidium
There's also the 20-volume, 8500-page Complete Works, which I first saw on the
bookshelf of Christopher Hitchens in some interview video. Much more difficult
to find [0].

[0]
[http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/162699.article](http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/162699.article)

------
jfasi
If you're as turned off by the formatting of this page as I am, I'm currently
working on a CSS framework to beautifully display longform text.

As luck would have it, this essay was my test case:

[http://alexgolec.github.io/orwell/politics](http://alexgolec.github.io/orwell/politics)

~~~
angelo
..and you somehow forget the _most_ important feature, bar none:

    
    
        p { max-width: 30em; }

~~~
jfasi
What browser are you using? I believe I implemented the max-width using a
container div rather than putting restrictions on the p elements.

------
dobbsbob
Timely post, considering the insanity I was just handed by my campus Social
Justice society on my way inside the student union building. It's full of
newspeak, and openly calls for the suppression and censorship of speech,
literature and music on campus and contains unclear/vague threats of
punishment to anybody "who benefits from promoting patriarchal attitudes and
relations of power that were inflicted here by colonists."

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Colonists? Where do you live?

------
codezero
I wonder what he'd say about memes. They seem to be the ultimate self-
reinforcing de-evolution of language.

In many ways, it seems like he is talking about memes, just the memes of his
own time.

    
    
       But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of
       worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and
       are merely used because they save people the trouble of
       inventing phrases for themselves.

~~~
pavlov
I don't know about that. At least memes don't pretend to be anything else than
they are. They are the unabashed verbal and visual equivalent of musical
jingles, things designed to grab your attention and stick in your head, but
nobody is suggesting that jingles are equivalent to Beethoven.

Corporate PowerPoint-talk is the spiritual heir of what Orwell is mocking in
his rewrite of the Old Testament passage. An ever-growing wall of "strategic"
abstractions and vaguely Latin buzzwords is used to hide the debilitating lack
of meaning and power that plagues the days of almost every mid-level manager
at any established company.

~~~
codezero
I agree they aren't intended to be high quality, but because of their ease of
use and mimicry, they are often used in place of actually formulating a
thought or statement which is similar to the themes in Orwell's piece.

    
    
      But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt
      thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation 
      even among people who should and do know better.

------
finin
This post on Language Log identifies ways in which Orwell violated his own
rules in the essay.

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992)

------
chillax
Well, this is perhaps the way we should write code too:

"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?"

------
reubenswartz
One of my favorite essays and even more relevant today than when Orwell wrote
it. ("Enemy combatants", "right-sizing", "Patriot Act") I think the effect in
business is even greater, partly because the bar for good business speech and
writing is so low.

I wrote a post inspired by Orwell's essay called How Your High School English
Teacher is Ruining Your Proposals to vent my frustration over language that
obfuscates rather than clarifies, whether intentionally or just due to
laziness. ([http://www.mimiran.com/proposals/how-your-high-school-
englis...](http://www.mimiran.com/proposals/how-your-high-school-english-
class-is-ruining-your-proposals/))

------
ribs
I've admired this essay of Orwell's since I first read it years ago, and have
striven to shed stale metaphors and pretense from my writing ever since. I
wonder how well I have succeeded.

------
l33tbro
Surprised to see such a seminal essay on the top of HN. I'm sure most people
here will have read this before ... but, hey, always a good re-read.

~~~
svachalek
How old do you think the average HN reader is? Or is this covered in some kind
of CS class?

~~~
l33tbro
I think the average user on this site is pretty literate. Easily a quarter of
the top posts are non-CS related.

------
comrade_ogilvy
_" The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de-
formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by
means of the not un- formation."_

Obviously, we need to deincentivize that.

 _" one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless
phrase ... into the dustbin, where it belongs."_

~~~
derleth
> into the dustbin

The irony being that this is one of the worst kind of cliches, proving that
Orwell had no idea what he was talking about.

------
mceoin
This was my first ever reading assignment at university, for an International
Relations class of all things!

I spent the next 5 years introducing it to others as a a precursor to any
copy-editing sessions.

------
shadowfiend
I'm about to go do something, but wanted to be somewhat critical; the result
will probably be a bit all over the place and incoherent:

The irony of this post, of course, is that it decries the evolution of
language while praising the evolved parts of the language.

Orwell says, ‘… while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead”
(e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and
can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two
classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all
evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of
inventing phrases for themselves.’ This as if dead metaphors simply
materialized overnight, and never lived in the middle class. Unsurprisingly,
several of the “dying metaphors” he cites are at this point in time
essentially dead (Achilles' heel and hotbed, for instance).

He leads with “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that
the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we
cannot by conscious action do anything about it.” It's immediately evident, I
suppose, that Orwell is a writer, not a scientist. Who is defined as bothering
with the matter at all? “Most” is quite the weasel word, isn't it? A case
study in phrasing things in a way that you can't really disagree with them.
I'm a self-and-by-others-described lover the English language, and misuse and
misspelling of words and phrases annoys me as much as text that is too
complicated to follow, but I don't think it means the “English language is in
a bad way”, any more than it did then. But then I'm simply not one of the
“most”, I suppose, by virtue of disagreeing.

“Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have
political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of
this or that individual writer.”

Let's grant that the language is declining. Is this assertion really clear? To
whom is this clear? It's certainly not clear to me. It isn't clear that either
side is true, or that it is false: indeed, the decline, or evolution, as I
would put it, of language is likely inextricably _intertwined_ with politics
and economics and technological evolution and society.

He addresses this immediately after, saying “But an effect can become a cause,
reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified
form, and so on indefinitely”, and in doing so he renders his previous
statement pointless, filler, not a meaningless word but a meaningless phrase!

To boot, he says: “Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not
through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a
minority.” His hope for curing the language is the conscious action of a
minority, but the decline of language cannot be due to the bad influence of a
minority?

Orwell makes good points at times here, I think, with respect to overly ornate
language that does nothing to clarify its own content. And he gives some
reasonable guidelines to boot. But he extrapolates these smaller conclusions
to bigger ones that are unlikely to be true, and presents them in a such a way
that you don't realize that he's weaseling out of truly concluding anything—he
simply postulates. Even when he does make good points about using language to
defend the indefensible, the idea that this is some sort of novel discovery
that was particularly bad in the 40s—or is now—is unfathomably foolish.

“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.”

What is deterioration, pray tell? What makes a _language_ worse? Did a change
in instruments in the second half of the twentieth century make our music
worse? Our great musicians? Did the emergence of Ruby or Python make our
programs worse? Our programmers? By what metric?

Really investigating the concept of worse or better when it comes to such
abstract things as language is incredibly difficult. Distinguishing _worse_
from _different_ is incredibly difficult unless maybe you're comparing two
things that were conceived at the exact same moment—and even then, your
judgement is specific to the now, not to forever.

“Look back through this essay,” Orwell says self-deprecatingly, “and for
certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I
am protesting against.” Conveniently, this makes 90% of the essay immune to
criticism. Another weaseling.

“Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned,
which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists.”

I'm afraid I must report to Mr Orwell that 67 years later, these metaphors are
alive and well—or, more likely, dead.

Is our English today “worse” than it was 50 years ago? If not, was it a small
cadre of noble writers who saved us? If the decline of language was arrested,
was that because the language stopped declining, or simply because on this
end, decline doesn't really look like decline—just movement? And if it is
worse, then how? All of the complaints he's making seem to be equally valid
today, but not particularly more so.

People have been trying to make points without having to really justify
themselves for ages, and they will continue to for many years to come. It
happens in politics, yes. But it seems that it also happens in essays about
politics and the English language.

~~~
yk

        The irony of this post, of course, is that it decries the
        evolution of language while praising the evolved parts of 
        the language.
    

He decries one aspect of the evolution of language, the aspect which just
hides meaning. And it seems to me, that objectively there is a incentive for
many stakeholders to disguise the inherent meaning of their message, either to
appear more disruptive in whichever space they move, or to straight out lie by
misunderstanding.

    
    
        What is deterioration, pray tell? What makes a language 
        worse? Did a change in instruments in the second half 
        of the twentieth century make our music worse? Our 
        great musicians? Did the emergence of Ruby or Python 
        make our programs worse? Our programmers? By what 
        metric?
    

Completely unrelated, but to use Cory Doctorow's [1] argument, it probably is.
His argument is, that electric guitars enabled a four man band to play a
concert. So at the start of the 20th century you need to be good enough to
convince a symphony orchestra to play your music to give a concert. This is a
rather strong filter. But with electric amplification all you need to do is to
convince a few friends. So probably the average quality of music dropped. But
on the other hand, this also allowed the rapid evolution of music in the
second half of the last century. Similar I would expect that the average
quality of writing is brought down by reddit, but simultaneously this will
likely fuel a much faster evolution. And for programming languages, it is
again the same. If you need to convince a mainframe operator to run your
program, then it should better be written well.

[1] [http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/01/cory-
doctorow-c...](http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/01/cory-doctorow-
close-enough-for-rock-n.html)

~~~
FreakLegion
_> He decries one aspect of the evolution of language, the aspect which just
hides meaning._

But that begs the question of whether meanings are in fact hidden, or simply
changed -- at least as far as language as a whole is concerned[1]. There are
of course individual cases where people are, as you point out, incentivized to
do all sorts of weird things with language to accomplish some goal. Thus was
rhetoric born.

1\. Many insults, for example, shed their original sense and persist only as
generic attacks. Does that mean that the original meanings are hidden? Or are
they simply no longer relevant? Like 'Scumbag':
[http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28253/origin-
of-s...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/28253/origin-of-scumbag).
(Note the several possible etymologies, none of which really bears on its use
today anyway.)

 _> And it seems to me, that objectively there is a incentive for many
stakeholders to disguise the inherent meaning of their message, either to
appear more disruptive in whichever space they move, or to straight out lie by
misunderstanding._

Well said. "To appear more disruptive" is particularly apropos on HN, where
'disruptive' is so perfunctory an adjective as to have lost all meaning (see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glittering_generality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glittering_generality)).

Edit: To Doctorow's point, I doubt that's quite true. In the West at least,
solo pieces (particularly piano), quartets and quintets of various kinds
(particularly brass and string), and so on have been popular for ages.

~~~
loup-vaillant
I sometimes try to talk with my mother about truth, reality, correct beliefs
and so on. Her problem is, she is relativist. To her, the idea that there's
only one reality, and that contradictory beliefs are incompatible is not only
false, but _repugnant_.

One of the major causes happens to be vocabulary. In French, the closest
synonymous for belief, "croyance", carries a heavy religious connotation. We
have other words, such as "knowledge", "opinion"… but they have other
problems. We just don't have a short colloquial word to convey the idea of a
probability distribution, _and no more_.

"No problem, I'll just define the word for her." But I'm not allowed to. I'm
supposed to be _accessible_ , which means no long sentences, and no jargon. My
trying to be precise comes of as pedantic, pretentious, and needlessly
complicated.

And so we're stuck. She doesn't understand what I mean, and I can't explain it
to her. Even worse, she actually believes she _does_ understand. Because my
words have meanings to her. Just not the meanings I wanted to convey.

\---

Regarding solo pieces, quartets, and quintets, you should note that guitar has
frets. Playing in tune is much easier compared to say, the cello. While
becoming a good guitarist requires just as much effort than becoming a good
cellist, merely playing something that sounds cool requires much, much less
effort.

------
benhamner
One of my favorite essays. I re-read this every six months as a reminder to be
as clear and precise as possible in my communication.

------
intellegacy
Schopenhauer said it 200 years before Orwell did, a fact I discovered only
this week.

I recommend Schopenhauer's essay if you liked this one. Read essays 1-3
[http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/](http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/)

------
Cyranix

      > one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some
        worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin,
        where it belongs.
    

Such a fitting sentence on which to end the essay, since "dustbin" is no
longer part of the modern English lexicon, as far as I know.

~~~
gojomo
Google N-Gram analysis suggests otherwise, with dustbin more common in books
in 2000 than the 1940s/1950s:

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dustbin%2Cwast...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dustbin%2Cwastebasket%2Ctrash+can&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdustbin%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwastebasket%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctrash%20can%3B%2Cc0)

However, it has be losing in relative rank to 'trash can'. I believe _dustbin_
is far more common in British English than North American English.

~~~
Cyranix
Many thanks to you and the other replies for increasing my linguistic cultural
awareness!

------
Eorge_Gorwell
Politics and the English Language [with annotations from a rational thinker]
[http://pastebin.com/mSzbX5Hd](http://pastebin.com/mSzbX5Hd)

------
tadmilbourn
I try to read this once a year to jolt myself out of my typical writing.
Another useful tip is to have "The Elements of Style" by Strunk & White
nearby.

------
peg_leg
This has always been one of my favorite essays.

