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.
>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.