Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

  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 A NOT UNJUSTIFIABLE ASSUMPTION

  THAT than to say I THINK. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only

  don't have to hunt about for 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. This is the

  significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up

  a visual image. When these images clash--as in THE FASCIST OCTOPUS HAS

  SUNG ITS SWAN SONG, THE JACKBOOT IS THROWN INTO THE MELTING POT--it can

  be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the

  objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look

  again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor

  Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous,

  making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip

  ALIEN for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of

  clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2)

  plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write

  prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase PUT UP

  WITH, is unwilling to look EGREGIOUS up in the dictionary and see what it

  means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply

  meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading

  the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows

  more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases

  chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning

  have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have

  a general emotional meaning--they dislike one thing and want to express

  solidarity with another--but they are not interested in the detail of

  what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he

  writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 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? But you are not obliged to go to all

  this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and

  letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your

  sentences for you--even think your thoughts for you, to a certain

  extent-and at need they will perform the important service of partially

  concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the

  special connection between politics and the debasement of language

  becomes clear.

  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 color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative

  style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles,

  manifestoes, White Papers and the speeches of under-secretaries do, of

  course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one

  almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. 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 towards 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 favorable to political conformity.

  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

  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.

  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 r�gime 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.
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br />   The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words

  falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines 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 squirting 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.

  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. The debased language that I have been

  discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like A NOT

  UNJUSTIFIABLE ASSUMPTION, LEAVES MUCH TO BE DESIRED, WOULD SERVE NO GOOD

  PURPOSE, A CONSIDERATION WHICH WE SHOULD DO WELL TO BEAR IN MIND, are a

  continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look

  back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again

  and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this

  morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in

  Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open

  it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see:

  "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical

  transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way

  as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same

  time of laying the foundations of a cooperative and unified Europe." You

  see, he "feels impelled" to write--feels, presumably, that he has

  something new to say--and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering

  the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary

  pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (LAY THE

  FOUNDATIONS, ACHIEVE A RADICAL TRANSFORMATION) can only be prevented if

  one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase

  anesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

  I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable.

  Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all,

  that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we

  cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and

  constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes,

  this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and

  expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process

  but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples

  were EXPLORE EVERY AVENUE and LEAVE NO STONE UNTURNED, which were killed

  by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown

  metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would

  interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh

  the NOT 'UN-' formation out of existence, [Note, below] to reduce the

  amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign

  phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make

  pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The

  defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it

  is best to start by saying what it does NOT imply.

  [Note: 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. (Author's footnote.)]

  To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of

  obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a

  "standard-English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it

  is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which

  has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and

  syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning

  clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is

  called a "good prose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with

  fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor

  does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin

  one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will

  cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning

  choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing

  one can do with words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete

  object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing

  you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the

  exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you

  are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a

  conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in

  and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your

  meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible

  and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations.

  Afterwards one can choose--not simply ACCEPT--the phrases that will best

  cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions

  one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the

  mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases,

  needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can

  often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs

  rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following

  rules will cover most cases:

  (i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are

  used to seeing in print.

  (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

  (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

  (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

  (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you

  can think of an everyday English equivalent.

  (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

  These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep

  change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style

  now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English,

  but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in these five

  specimens at the beginning of this article.

  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 recognize 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.

  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.

  POLITICS VS. LITERATURE: AN EXAMINATION OF GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

  In GULLIVER'S TRAVELS humanity is attacked, or criticized, from at least

  three different angles, and the implied character of Gulliver himself

  necessarily changes somewhat in the process. In Part I he is the typical

  eighteenth-century voyager, bold, practical and unromantic, his homely

  outlook skilfully impressed on the reader by the biographical details at

  the beginning, by his age (he is a man of forty, with two children, when

  his adventures start), and by the inventory of the things in his pockets,

  especially his spectacles, which make several appearances. In Part II he

  has in general the same character, but at moments when the story demands

  it he has a tendency to develop into an imbecile who is capable of

  boasting of "our noble Country, the Mistress of Arts and Arms, the

  Scourge of France", etc., etc., and at the same time of betraying every

  available scandalous fact about the country which he professes to love.

  In Part III he is much as he was in Part I, though, as he is consorting

  chiefly with courtiers and men of learning, one has the impression that

  he has risen in the social scale. In Part IV he conceives a horror of the

  human race which is not apparent, or only intermittently apparent, in the

  earlier books, and changes into a sort of unreligious anchorite whose one

  desire is to live in some desolate spot where he can devote himself to

  meditating on the goodness of the Houyhnhnms. However, these

  inconsistencies are forced upon Swift by the fact that Gulliver is there

  chiefly to provide a contrast. It is necessary, for instance, that he

  should appear sensible in Part I and at least intermittently silly in

  Part II because in both books the essential manoeuvre is the same, i.e.

  to make the human being look ridiculous by imagining him as a creature

  six inches high. Whenever Gulliver is not acting as a stooge there is a

  sort of continuity in his character, which comes out especially in his

  resourcefulness and his observation of physical detail. He is much the

  same kind of person, with the same prose style, when he bears off the

  warships of Blefuscu, when he rips open the belly of the monstrous rat,

  and when he sails away upon the ocean in his frail coracle made from the

  skins of Yahoos. Moreover, it is difficult not to feel that in his

  shrewder moments Gulliver is simply Swift himself, and there is at least

  one incident in which Swift seems to be venting his private grievance

  against contemporary Society. It will be remembered that when the Emperor

  of Lilliput's palace catches fire, Gulliver puts it out by urinating on

  it. Instead of being congratulated on his presence of mind, he finds

  that he has committed a capital offence by making water in the precincts