I love this essay. The whole essay is good, but I really like this paragraph:
>In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense 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. Defenseless 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.
Stephen Pinker quotes that exact passage in _The Better Angels of our Nature_. He rebuts:
> Orwell was wrong about one thing: that political euphemism was a phenomenon of his time. A century and a half before Orwell, Edmund Burke complained about the euphemisms emanating from revolutionary France:
> "The whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies and circumlocutions for massacres and murder. They are never called by their common name. Massacre is sometimes called _agitation_, sometimes _effervescence_, sometimes _excess_; sometimes _too continued an excercise of a revokutionary power_.
As someone who believes in "choice", if that's the euphemistic term, I will still argue that abortion absolutely involves killing a human being. That is a thing which you once were, given the natural course of events, it would grow into a living, breathing human like you or I. It's not like a sperm or an egg which have no potential until positive action is taken, the deed is done and that's becoming a human if we let it.
Which is Orwell's point, really. Abortion is death. It also is defensible. But because "killing" is hard and difficult to defend, we come up with euphemistic terms so we can stomach it.
I appreciate your intellectual honesty. Abortion is death, taking a human life.
The question is whether the justification suffices. For abortion, the justification is: "Because the mother doesn't want the child, we allow her to kill it in the womb."
The womb, her body, is her property. It's unfortunate that the child can't survive outside of it, but that doesn't make throwing it out comparable to Orwell's examples.
And there was once a matter of debate whether blacks in the US counted as full human beings.
If there's brain activity and a beating heart, there's really no scientific basis for saying an unborn human isn't a human being.
This goes back to Orwell's essay. We use euphemisms to soften brutal realities. A war monger may say we're simply bombing "savages", and an abortionist may say we're simply culling a "clump of cells."
There's a question of viability that I think matters. An unborn human starts as a clump of cells, develops a brain and heart but is still not viable on its own, and then if all goes well it becomes viable by the time it is born. It's human all the way through, but different people draw the line on abortion in different places along the path to viability.
Slaves were always completely viable. Bringing them up in a discussion about abortion is a strawman argument.
If you use viability as a guideline, you do bring into the debate people who were viable, but who through disease or accident are no longer viable. Should they be 'abort-able'? I think if the rules around abortion were flexible enough to apply to these people as well, they'd probably be solid enough to satisfy almost everyone's moral and legal sensibilities.
I may regret posting this since it's getting far off the topic of language, but the discussion is an interesting one.
I don't think the line is drawn on the viability spectrum. A baby isn't viable until a month before it comes out of the womb, and that's a stretch. So I don't think this is a matter of people disagreeing with what constitutes viable because there really can't be any debate about that. I would argue that "potentiality" is a better term here.
The arguments, at their core, revolve around the fact that you have two living things who's interests may not be aligned. It's a question of who's interests will be favored.
Now, you can feel what you want about this, I don't want to get into a policy argument, but let's not dance around the issue, abortion is about the conflict between two abhorrent options.
This has been happening a lot with words, Negro to African American, Indian to Native American, moron, idiot, and retard were all once medical terms, now replaced by mentally challenged, midget to little person, queer also once a medical term, replaced by member of LGBTQ. Many disorders are being replaced by acronyms, ADD, ADHD, PTSD etc.
I think removing the humanity from these words is part of the point, because people are naturally judgmental, if they hear "Operational Exhaustion" they think "Oh, just tired then", not that there is a medical issue. You can't use "mentally challenged" as an insult precisely because it's had the humanity sucked out. Assuming that a term having "humanity" means for it to have emotional connotations.
Words are stretched and tortured such that it's difficult to immediately derive the meaning, which again is the point, to get you to use your logical brain rather than your more emotional lizard brain.
I actually think Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder sounds pretty bad, primarily because it says "disorder," i.e. it's an admittance that something is wrong.
Whereas "Operational Exhaustion" sounds very soft and innocent.
~Oh, that's a good point. Taking the "disorder" out might help the VA in denying treatment for it, and make it seem more like the soldier's fault that they have it.~
~How about "mission resilience depletion"? That makes it seem more like they just forgot to recharge the batteries in their mobile phones. Or "norepinephrine-cortisol disruption syndrome", which makes it sound more like they haven't been taking their pills at the correct dosage.~
I'd say that PTSD sounds the worst, though because it has the very negative words "traumatic", "stress" and "disorder". The middle 2 are the least bad, because "exhaustion" is not that negative.
I agree that's another attempt. It doesn't work for me though as it always makes me think of a cauldron of bubbling fat -- not the soothing effect the speaker is after.
I think this advice is misunderstood -- part of Orwell's advice here is that you can't always use the active voice. Not, at least, without inflicting worse injuries to the language than with the passive. I read Orwell here as saying that the passive is often used to conceal agency when the active would be both more honest and more natural, not that we should never use the passive.
> I read Orwell here as saying that the passive is often used to conceal agency when the active would be both more honest and more natural, not that we should never use the passive.
You're responding to a much broader claim than anyone here is actually making. The point is not that the passive voice always conceals agency. The point is that people often use the passive voice in order to conceal agency.
I don't think I am responding to the claim you think I am.
If we want agency to be clearly attributed, we will do better to ask whether agency is clearly attributed than to ask if the passive voice is used. It's what we care about, and it is a determination people are often better at making in the first place.
Fair enough! Though I also don't think anyone was claiming that listening for the passive voice is the best or only way to identify when someone is dodging responsibility.
I don't think anyone was claiming that listening for the passive voice is the only way to identify when someone is dodging responsibility.
I do think it is being identified (at least) as an important or effective way of noticing when you are being evasive in your own writing - otherwise why is "the passive is often used to conceal agency" even relevant to the question of improving your writing? And I think to that end, asking the more direct question is better.
Stephen Pinker has the following (and more) to say about the passive versus active. From _The Sense of Style_,
“The passive voice, too, has several uses in English. One of them […] is indispensable to classic style: the passive allows the writer to direct the reader’s gaze, like a cinematographer choosing the best camera angle.”
The example he gives -- and I'm sure you can come up with many more -- is,
See that lady with the shopping bag? She's pelting a mime with a zucchini.
versus,
See that mime? He's being pelted with zucchini by the lady with the shopping bag.
And there's this,
“As the linguist Geoffrey Pullum has noted, there is nothing wrong with a news report that uses the passive voice to say, ‘Helicopters were flown in to put out the fires.’ The reader does not need to be informed that Bob was flying one of the helicopters.”
This would be why Orwell said to break his rules rather than write something insensible. I think they're best understood as a toolbox for spotting when people are telling us certain kinds of lies. The passive voice is a tool, but it's important to look at why the writer decided to change the camera angle to avoid looking at who actually did the thing.
We certainly don't need to care about the agency for every trivial matter, but we certainly should know when clever 'camera angles' are being used by the author to hide an agent in the shadows.
Ah, Orwell. This was one of his pet peeves. He spent much of WWII translating news into Basic English for transmission to British colonies. The evasions and hyperbole of political speech had to be expressed in the plain and practical words of Basic English. That's a political act. Newspeak in "1984" came from that experience.
His list of worn-out metaphors understood by few, "ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed" is still apt. "Ring the changes" is misused in today's South China Morning Post.[1] My own favorite is "free rein", which is a horse term. (One not used by riders today; riders say "loose rein".) It often appears today as "free reign".
Today's metaphors come from popular culture rather than the classics, and age faster. This may not be an improvement.
Indeed, "melting pot" makes me think of think-tanks or a busy "scene" area, it doesn't make me think of an actual melting pot, the words themselves doesn't conjure up the mental image that they refer to, so the strength of the metaphor is weak.
Reading Orwell's own writing in this article "like tea leaves caught in the sink" it conjures up a fresh mental image.
One thing I discovered during 6 years of living in central Europe is that speaking mostly with non-native English speakers leads to a necessary elimination of metaphors; you have to use direct words. I can't say "he's trying to pull the wool over your eyes" or "don't let the cat out of the bag" or whatever, because nobody has any idea what I'm saying, and it's not worth explaining. I considered it a kind of mental training, it taught me to speak plainer English.
>the words themselves doesn't conjure up the mental image
>that they refer to, so the strength of the metaphor is
>weak.
This is a fair summary of the problem with clichés. But as readers we share responsibility for this: if we were to read less casually and more critically, we would identify the metaphor on both levels, and increase our own understanding and experience.
Much of "1984" is autobiographical. Orwell worked for the British Ministry of Information, upon which his Ministry of Truth is based. See "George Orwell, the Lost Writings".
> political speech had to be expressed in the plain and practical words of Basic English. […] Newspeak in "1984" came from that experience.
That makes his use of Newspeak especially interesting, because it was through Newspeak that the government in "1984" circumlocuted. I guess he became disillusioned with the idea that Basic English was impervious to circumlocution.
And he lived for a time in Paris with his aunt and her boyfriend, who were Esperanto speakers. In fact, the boyfriend was Eugène Lanti, the well known (in Esperantist circles) author.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Lanti
Absolutely. Would give this 10 upvotes if I could and would have said it myself if you had already done so. Also very relevant is the essay "Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory"[1] by linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum (2004). I believe the spiritual predecessor of all of these to be in many ways Schopenhauer's (1891) essay "On Style"[2] Both are short, readable, and nutritious. :)
By far the most interesting, engaging, wide ranging, and thought provoking review of a dictionary I've ever read.
The strength of this recommendation seems like it should be diminished by the fact that I've only ever read one review of a dictionary, but I defy anyone to produce a better one. If you can, though, I definitely want to read your candidate.
The below example is stunning. I feel sick to recognize the second paragraph (especially in academic writing), and I feel strong relief that the first paragraph can exist.
> 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.
As a counterpoint, I didn't quite understand the point of the first paragraph, until I read the second. And the second paragraph, while less poetic, is clearer in meaning in that it makes a concrete statement that can be evaluated, which in this case is good because it's clearly wrong. Success or failure in competitive activities exhibits a strong correlation with innate ability, otherwise what would innate ability even mean? I don't see how I could make an argument like that on the first paragraph; it's too waffly and vague and grand.
I think you have a naive understanding of the theme in these paragraphs. Competitive situations do NOT have a strong correlation with innate ability. Outside factors will often have as much or more influence than innate ability (practice beats talent, as the saying goes). I suppose it depends on which 'competitive situation' we are talking about. That is the point of this comparison, though, saying 'competitive situation' leaves things overly vague.
To take a concrete example, 9/10 startups fail (or something like that, I'm sure someone has the correct ratio). Does that mean that 9/10 founders are innately unfit to found a company? It seems much more likely that success is a combination of getting the right people working on the right project at the right time in the right place and being noticed by the right people. Even the well educated, connected, entrepreneurial founder might fail because of any one of those (or other) factors.
The first paragraph explains this concept succinctly and beautifully. The fact that the second does not convey this meaning while technically containing the same information, is the point of this article.
I disagree about the point of the first paragraph. Orwell
made a bad translation (which was Orwell's point)
"Competitive activities" sounds like it refers to artificial, structured activities made for the purpose of measuring ability, so just like you say the correlation should be strong. In those activities, people work hard to make sure the competitors don't cheat, that the rules are fair, and so on.
However, the first paragraph is not about artificial competitions but about natural, chaotic situations. It's about victory in a chaotic battle or acquiring wealth back when capitalism hadn't been invented yet. Basically it means "life is unfair, sometimes".
This essay has been on HN a few times before, but I'm upvoting this anyways. It's one of the greatest essays ever written. It will change how you write, and how you perceive the writing of others.
My favorite history professor in college plugged this essay in all of his courses. He often said it was one of the most important essays to read if you want to understand why politicians and public figures speak the way they do. It's one of those great essays that everyone should read at least once.
What's frustrating about Orwell's writing advice here is that it doesn't really improve society unless everyone does it. If I write using Orwell's rules and my political opponent doesn't, I'll likely lose.
If anything, I wish that the phenomenon Orwell is describing would be used by the people on the "right" side more often--but people who are doing what they think is right don't as often feel the need to obfuscate it for PR purposes.
Ultimately I think understanding the phenomenon Orwell describes is fundamental. You should be able to read "Two died after a shooting incident involving LAPD officers" and know to look further to discover that meant "LAPD shot and killed two unarmed black men". But actually following Orwell's advice on how to write puts you at a disadvantage. Playing by the rules when your opponents aren't is a fool's game.
> I don't think that is evident at all. Clear writing will resonate with the reader far more than hackneyed, pretentious constructions.
Then why are all the most popular news sources full of clickbait, inflammatory headlines, and cliffhanger hooks?
> Many of the best communicators in history successfully employed "simpler" verbal constructions than those Orwell rails against.
History is written by historians, and historians are biased toward things that interest them. Simpler verbal constructions might get written about more by an educated historian, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were the most influential in their time.
Right, mine too, but it's highly dangerous to assume that your experience is the majority experience. Look at which news sources are popular, and you won't find a single one that writes in a direct style.
Also, realize that people writing NewSpeak have gotten better at it since Orwell wrote this.
"Marxism and the Problem of Linguistics" (1950) by Stalin [1] is an interesting read to go alongside this. You've got Stalin saying that we shouldn't distort language so much so that it loses it's practical use in everyday matters simply because it is inherited from pre-communist ideologies. In a way he is saying that the slippery slope of language manipulation is useful for political purposes, but should not be followed all the way down into impracticality. This was a problem Stalin had as people were excessively fanatical to the point of absurdity to avoid being purged, so he had to give them the ability to limit their fanaticism by saying that some allowance for practicality in the use of language was part of the Stalinist orthodoxy and thus not "reactionary".
When I hear neologisms from the radical left or right this is the first thing that comes to mind. I don't take it as a writing style guide, rather as a guide to spotting tyranny.
The neologisms from FOX and social justice warriors are politics of language.
You know Orwell himself was a fairly radical leftist, at least in his youth? He fought in a Trotskyite group in the Spanish Civil War.
People read Animal Farm's denunciations of the founding of the USSR and confuse his anti-Soviet stance with an anti-socialist stance. He was disillusioned with the behavior of the Russian communists during the Spanish Civil War, which really turned him against them.
(The anti-fascist coalition was broadly anarchist, with a smattering of foreign, communist, socialist and other forces. Despite being <5% of the total coalition, the Russian communist government refused to provide material aid unless their forces were put in charge, which the coalition declined. Since the western governments (Britain, France, US) refused to help at all, the anti-fascist forces had no support, and were overwhelmed by Franco, ushering in decades of fascism in Spain.)
Interesting, thank you. However I did not intend to condemn all radical politics. Rather my point was that the promulgation of any political views by foisting a sympathetic vocabulary onto the public is tyrannical. Are there any political ideas that require a new vocabulary? I don't know.
> Rather my point was that the promulgation of any political views by foisting a sympathetic vocabulary onto the public is tyrannical.
but the examples you gave of political views were "Far Left" "Fox News" "Social Justice Warriors" whereas George Orwell would be concerned about how the seemingly staid mainstream's use of political language. 'smart bombs' 'neutralize target' 'pacification [of Vietnam]' etc are all vocabulary promulgated by establishment politicians and mainstream newspapers and vastly more dangerous than what "social justice warriors" try to foist.
You're right in that the mainstream is guilty as well. I see SJWs as attempting to suppress free speech however, which I perceive as unambiguously tyrannical.
Would you care to define what neologisms are used by "social justice warriors"? I've never been able to take that term seriously, and instead use it, somewhat counter to your point, as an indicator that the person who is using it will not be reasonable.
My view is that freedom is the essential right, and that social justice can only follow, not precede it. Here is a clear example of a movement that values its perception of social justice over freedom of speech: https://www.google.com/search?q=university+of+toronto+mra+fi....
I'm going to be honest, that seems somewhat naive and poorly thought out. Take both the rule of law and certain laws we have regarding employee rights. In many places, you can't fire someone because you don't like homosexuals and in other places you can't fire people because they have cancer. Both of these are in fact a restriction of freedom to ensure social justice, there by completely contradicting "social justice can only follow freedom". When in our society it is actually the restriction of freedom that allows social justice its place in society (at least in my example) -- and rightly so in my opinion.
I would suggest not using one-off examples that you gave if you're wanting to paint a broader picture, or use it as a basis for a set of foundational principles.
But regardless, I would like an example of what "SJW's" words and statements are being used as thought-terminating cliches in true Orwellian fashion. I'd also like to know why you consider using such terms as "SJW" to be exempt from that (presumably). If "SJW" is politics of language, and you say it arguably is, then why did you employ such terminology in a post about not employing such rhetoric?
I agree that some laws promote justice at the expense of freedom, and have no problem with it in many circumstances. I am by no means the first to point out that there is a "regressive left" trend nowadays. Leftists can be authoritarian too, as was Stalin.
I gave you an example of SJW's who regard the "patriarchy" as a threat more significant than the free speech of the men who were trying to have a meeting. In other words, they valued "social justice" more than freedom. I feel you ought to address this before asking for another example.
I am enjoying the essay, to the extent that it makes C++ and its compile times seem not so bad.
But how much of the badness is really unique to the English language, or to the modern world?
My guess is that all times and places have wallowed in mushy rhetoric, and always will. If we look back at Pericles or Cicero or Jefferson and see better verbiage, that's because we are selecting for it.
I'm surrounded by people who speak 'politically'. Rather than making their statements clear and explicit, they structure their words in ways that allow them to conceal the true meaning of what they said. Using verbs to misrepresent meaning makes it tough to have good communication and solid understanding between group members.
Be an example to others, speak plainly and clearly when opportunity presents itself. Assuming you are not in a too bad place, this may win you some friends who are made of the right stuff and separate you from those who like to impress, control or deceive with language. Of course, leaving for the better environment is sometimes the best option.
> If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Does anybody know if this has been (properly) studied? It's not quite so obvious that succinctness is good for readability and comprehension, and I think it could also go the other way.
I don't know whether this has been or can be studied formally, but anecdotally I think modern writing often suffers from excess verbiage. Essays sometimes go on for a long time without saying much, and this can cause a lot of frustration for readers. I'm sure many of you have felt this frustration when reading political opinion pieces.
A fun exercise that illustrates Orwell's point, when reading a sentence, see how much you can reduce it without losing its original meaning. For instance, I frame your question as follows:
"Do we know if this has been studied? It's not obvious that succinctness is better for readability and comprehension. It might be worse."
You can think of this as the writer's version of code golf.
On a tangential note, most of pg's articles are succinct and to the point. I feel he pays special attention to using the minimum number of words to express an idea.. one of the reasons I enjoy reading his essays.
You changed the meaning! For example, "It's not quite so obvious" means "It's not as obvious as Orwell seems to think it is", and is not the same as "It's not obvious". (Otherwise the "quite" would have been unnecessary, and I wouldn't have used it.)
That bit is something of a cop-out, because of how open-ended it is. One feels entitled to an explanation as to exactly when those rules should be broken, or what would qualify as barbarous. And why, exactly, do the previous bits of advice not mention their conditions of applicability?
Bear in mind, it is quite possible that Orwell meant what he said (in the direct, plain meaning of it), and got it wrong.
Maybe it's a pet peeve, but I loathe advice of the form "do just the right amount of a thing" that doesn't say how one is to determine the "right" amount. After all, if that was the easier part of following the advice, one wouldn't need the advice in the first place.
Orwell was British. The use of 'to cut (a thing)' to mean 'to remove' comes from the American English vernacular. Though the lines are more blurred today, I suspect at the time this was written it would have been extremely odd for Orwell to use that phrasing. In British English, there's really not a shorter way to put that!
Truly a great essay... When I reread it a couple years ago I made the semi-serious connection to bad but all too common object oriented programming practices as exemplified in Yegge's http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom... Orwell says:
> 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. 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.
To me it's a funny, semi-serious connection. I see many Javalanders are very happy with Java, and have been for quite some time. For them it's easier, and quicker once they're in the habit, to fire up Eclipse (or IntelliJ), autocomplete and autorefactor and glue together this and that without having to think much (hey tests are green!), sling giant names and namespaces around dozens of files and directories up and down various call stacks in and out of giant systems like Spring and Hibernate, a few even try to match large programming patterns to everything... Yet still they frequently fail to convey in code just what exactly is actually happening. In many cases they just needed a few functions in a file or two with concise names that can be remembered and typed without assistance, even written faithfully on paper without having to use shorthand.
Oh yeah, experienced this firsthand with an overall score of 8.5 but a 7 in writing. It's really unreliable and graded on a messy and rather elitist rubric.
I'd also agree with Geoff Pullum's characterization of it as "a smug, arrogant, dishonest tract full of posturing and pothering, and writing advice that ranges from idiosyncratic to irrational" (http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/04/04/eliminati...)
But apart from it being a very poor source of writing advice, I don't believe it's accurate in its diagnosis of how language is deployed for political ends—the question is a much more complicated one than he claims here.
There exist actual good books that can teach you how to write better, instead of patting you on the back and allowing you to tut-tut at those plebians who write things that are "outright barbarous". Pinker's The Sense of Style is one of those; Ann Lamott's Bird by Bird is another. There also exist much better (and more accurate and scientific) resources about how language actually affects the way we think about things. Benjamin Bergen's Louder than Words is an excellent start, and virtually anything from Lakoff's long list of publications is worth reading—Metaphors We Live By is the classic, but Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things in particular is excellent from his more recent work.
The piece by David Beaver seems quite poor to me. What sense does it have to turn the Orwell’s sixth rule (“feel free to break the rules if they stand in the way of plain speech”) into a paradox? Its meaning is obvious. Bashing the active/passive voice rule or the use of metaphors is pure nit-picking, as already said by iso-8859-1. (And “milquetoast simulacra”, WTF?)
A lot of people seem to get very angry about this. I wonder if this has more to do with memories of English teaching at school - where sometimes they do terrible things to writing - than to the content.
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.
I like this piece by Louis Menard in the New Yorker: "Honest, Decent, Wrong" [1], which is deeply critical of Orwell, including this essay:
> “Big Brother” and “doublethink” and “thought police” are frequently cited as contributions to the language. They are, but they belong to the same category as “liar” and “pervert” and “madman.” They are conversation-stoppers. When a court allows videotape from a hidden camera to be used in a trial, people shout “Big Brother.” When a politician refers to his proposal to permit logging on national land as “environmentally friendly,” he is charged with “doublethink.” When a critic finds sexism in a poem, she is accused of being a member of the “thought police.” The terms can be used to discredit virtually any position, which is one of the reasons that Orwell became everyone's favorite political thinker. People learned to make any deviation from their own platform seem the first step on the slippery slope to “1984.”
And:
> Orwell wrote many strong essays, but “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946, is not one of them. Half of the essay is an attack on bad prose. Orwell is against abstractions, mixed metaphors, Latinate roots, polysyllabic words, clichés, and most of the other stylistic vices identified in Fowler's “Modern English Usage” (in its fourth printing in 1946). The other half is an attack on political dishonesty. Certain political terms, Orwell argues, are often used in a consciously dishonest way. ... Fowler would have found nothing to complain about, though, in the sentences Orwell objects to. They are as clear as can be. Somehow, Orwell has run together his distaste for flowery, stale prose with his distaste for fascism, Stalinism, and Roman Catholicism. He makes it seem that the problem with fascism (and the rest) is, at bottom, a problem of style. They're bad, we are encouraged to feel, because their language is bad, because they're ugly.
> This is not an isolated instance of this way of thinking in Orwell. From his earliest work, he was obsessed with body odor ... Smell has no relation to virtue, however. Ugliness has no relation to insincerity or evil, and short words with Anglo-Saxon roots have no relation to truth or goodness. Political speech, like etiquette, has its codes and its euphemisms, and Orwell is right to insist that it is important to be able to decipher them. He says that if what he calls political speech—by which he appears to mean political clichés—were translated into plain, everyday speech, confusion and insincerity would begin to evaporate. It is a worthy, if unrealistic, hope. But he does not stop there. All politics, he writes, “is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” And by the end of the essay he has damned the whole discourse: “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.” All political parties? Orwell had sniffed out a tendency.
It's a great, thoughtful piece, I recommend reading the whole thing.
Despite the fact it was meant for something probably different, this reminds me of what Umberto Eco wrote in his "Ur-Fascism": [...] We kids hurried to pick up the shells, precious items, but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
And, sad enough, nowadays we are full of rhetoric.
I remember reading this in my high school English class, it was really the only substantive work that I ever come across on how not to write badly. I could never find another how-to work on how to keep your writing from being bad.
I've often (but only casually) wondered why "Orwelianism" isn't a thing, like Marxism or Leninism or Reaganism/Thatcherism. I kind of understand why, as I think his world view outs such things as inherently abhorrent, but since when has that stopped people making idols out of people and dogma out of the things they say?
But still, it would be nice if "Orwelianism" meant "Adhering to the principles of George Orwell in encouraging critical thinking and considered reasoned observation" and if it became a school of political thought... alas, all good ideas are corrupted in the end, but human progress walks on the stepping stones of ideologies, and it seems we've had nothing but nasty ones for a very long time.
Well, he was never in power, never had "followers", wouldn't have wanted them, and actively promoted his own disillusionment with the dogmatic end of the Left.
Whereas an ideology requires a dogma: a set of things that are not questioned.
"Orwellian" is totally a thing, but I don't think that when people say "Orwellian" they are talking about Orwell's ideology--they're usually talking about the kinds of problems that Orwell wrote about in 1984 and Politics and the English Language. It's analogous to how some diseases are named after the doctors who identified them--obviously the doctor doesn't cause the disease or want it to happen, they simply identified it.
> encouraging critical thinking and considered reasoned observation
That's already called rationalism and/or empiricism. Why does it need a surname attached to it? It would only obscure the meaning. I think Orwell himself would not be pleased; he very much argued in favour of expressing yourself clearly. I think he has even wrote some kind of essay about it, but I can't recall the title.
I'm not saying Orwelianism should be a thing, I'm wondering why it isn't. As I said in my comment, it doesn't matter what Orwell himself has to say on the matter. By all accounts, Jesus (if he were a real figure) wasn't keen on the idea of organised religion, yet here we are. Once your dead, you lose any say in the matter and the words you leave behind will be appropriated, decontextualised and regurgitated to make you say things you never would.
I think Orwell has a lot of the traits that made people like Marx idols. A good chunk of his writing is actually instruction. And he has a lot of fans, but no fanatics. I merely find it curious that Orewlianism isn't an ideology.
I did take an extra step and pondered wether it would be a good thing, but that's a throw away thought.
Every time Donald Trump opens his mouth, something horrible comes out. His supporters are right about one thing: he says what he believes with almost no brain-mouth filter, and that's really the best thing about him.
People who support odious policies and want to see them enacted can't do that, so they have to weasel-word it.
I used to like this essay, but the folks over at [UPenn's Language Log](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992) do a great takedown of it, and I am inclined to agree with them. Orwell is extremely hypocritical (which many people try to claim is a "deliberate stroke of genius", with very little evidence to support it).
It's particularly a hit amongst center-left liberals who are emboldened into feeling like they are very righteous by not doing anything at all. The more accurate observation comes from commenter Mark F:
> The reason Orwell's essay makes some people angry is that it depicts violations of stylistic rules as moral violations. Use the passive, it says, and you are playing into the hands of the totalitarians. I think that's also why some people like it; people can feel like they're defending the cause of freedom by writing concisely.
> I tend to side with the former camp. I think people pick up on cant pretty well without his help, except when it's telling them something they already want to believe. And in the latter case his help is no use.
There's a kind of person out there who really likes George Orwell, Steven Pinker, David Foster Wallace, Christopher Hitchens, etc. which all pander to a political sensibility that is very self-congratulatory about inaction, and consistently says "things are fine, don't rock the boat, you'll make things worse".
It's ironic that on HN, critics of Orwell's work are said to be "your typical critics", but really, it's Orwell and Pinker and co. that consistently push/pushed out tracts that are critical takedowns of third parties. So their readers are now smugly self-satisfied twice over: once when agreeing with the authors, once while dismissing their critics.
You have a point. There is always that possibility that a particular employment of language politics is just, so to reject all political neologisms risks rejecting the just ones too.
I struggle with the language of women's rights, for instance. I think about Orwell when I hear 'mansplaining' for example. Yet, at the same time I often see challenges that are unique to women.
OK read it. Not impressed. Orwell is a liar because: "Let's move to his first rule 'Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print'? Yet we only need to read as far as the second sentence of his essay to see him talk of the 'collapse' of civilization. That would be a literal collapse would it?"
This is pedantry. All language is metaphorical at some level. 'Vagina' literally means 'sheath'. Should we avoid that one? How about describing an argument as 'crystalline'? I would argue that 'collapse' in that sense is no more metaphorical than crystalline.
There is a continuum: someone, somewhere called it a sheath, and the metaphor was so apt that it was repeated until it eclipsed whatever word was current usage before. Neither you nor anyone else is qualified to judge which words are metaphorical and which aren't.
Well, you're right in that vagina literally means vagina in English. And yes, there are occasions where language is unambiguously metaphorical. I do not, however, appreciate how either of these undermine my larger claim. Not sure if you disagree with me on a more fundamental level or not.
Orwell's advice on how to write better English is at best naively harmfully, and at worst cravenly hypocritical. He never followed his own "rules", why in the hell should anyone else? Answer: because his rules are self-serving bullshit.
Case in point: Orwell uses passive constructions 40% more frequently than than an average English corpus. This essay is full of them. Language Log did a brilliant analysis of the essay's towering inaccuracy and hypocrisy:
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
And wouldn't you know it, the very first sentence of Orwell's essay runs:
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.
---
His rules are bullshit, and he knew it, which is why he was smart enough to ignore them completely.
He didn't ignore them completely. Orwell's writing is famously lucid. He could have used orotund obfuscations and otiose circumlocutions far more than he did, but he chose not to.
There's a difference between grammatical correctness, journalistic conciseness, and social register.
The "long" sentence is an example of the latter - it tells the reader something about the writer, and it uses stock cliches that make it more appealing to one particular social group.
Writing can be as much about social signalling and persuasion as plain content and grammar.
If you want to see English that completely fails to follow the rules, and is even more about social signalling than content, try this letter:
I'm not sure how you're able to conclude that the guidelines are bullshit just because he himself fails to adhere strictly to them. All authors break their own guidelines from time to time.
I feel like this is something the HN audience should be familiar with. At least I personally know a lot of guidelines for creating maintainable software, but there are a host of conditions which will cause me to bypass them anyway.
The article itself basically says "I break these rules regularly, I'm not perfect either". But I think some people like to point out people's flaws to show off. Orwell's article is sincere.
>In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense 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. Defenseless 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.