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Politics and the English Language
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"Politics and the English Language" (1946) is an essay by George Orwell criticizing "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English.
In it he asserts that contemporary English prose causes foolish thoughts and dishonest politics. "Vagueness and sheer incompetence" are the "most marked characteristics" of contemporary English prose, he writes. Orwell criticizes the preferences of writers of his day for abstract vocabulary to concrete words and suggests that they impair precise thought.
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Encyclopedia
"Politics and the English Language" (1946) is an essay by George Orwell criticizing "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English.
In it he asserts that contemporary English prose causes foolish thoughts and dishonest politics. "Vagueness and sheer incompetence" are the "most marked characteristics" of contemporary English prose, he writes. Orwell criticizes the preferences of writers of his day for abstract vocabulary to concrete words and suggests that they impair precise thought. He argues that insincerity is the enemy of clear prose and that vague political writing is a defense of indefensible values. He contends that vague expressions cause ugly writing and conceal a writer's thoughts from himself and others. As a writer, George Orwell "believed he was [morally] bound to give as much of himself to his writing as he could" and so "drove himself relentlessly" to avoid the kind of bad writing he describes in the essay.
Orwell posits in his essay that the decline of the English language he observed was reversible. He cites five contemporary examples of bad writing, criticizing them for "staleness of imagery" and "lack of precision". "Politics and the English Language" also describes three tricks Orwell perceives as common to avoid the work and thought required for composing clear prose: overused, "dying" metaphors, "operators or false verbal limbs" used in place of simple verbs, litotes (like "not unfamiliar"), pretentious diction, and meaningless words.
History
"Politics and the English Language" was originally published in the April 1946 issue of the journal Horizon. It was written at a time of critical and commercial literary success for Orwell when Animal Farm had just been completed and Nineteen Eighty-Four was a preliminary manuscript. Introductory writing courses frequently cite this essay, and in Orwell's authorized biography, Michael Sheldon calls it "his most influential essay."
Connection to other works
The essay "Politics and the English Language" was published nearly simultaneously with another of Orwell's essays, "The Prevention of Literature". Both reflect Orwell's concern with truth and how truth depends upon the use of language. Readers can observe Orwell's preoccupation with language in protagonist Gordon Comstock's dislike of advertising slogans in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, an early work of Orwell's. This preoccupation is also visible in Homage to Catalonia, and continued as an underlying theme of Orwell's work for the years after World War II.
A perfect example of this development is the way the themes in "Politics and the English Language" anticipate Orwell's development of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four. One analyst, Michael Shelden, calls Newspeak "the perfect language for a society of bad writers (like those Orwell describes in "Politics and the English Language") because it reduces the number of choices available to them." Developing themes Orwell began exploring in this essay, Newspeak first corrupts writers morally, then politically, "since it allows writers to cheat themselves and their readers with ready-made prose".
"Translation" of Ecclesiastes
To give an example of what he is describing, Orwell "translates" Ecclesiastes 9:11,
into "modern English of the worst sort,"
One of Orwell's instructors at St Cyprian's School, Mrs. Cicely Wilkes, had used the same method to illustrate good writing to her students. She would use simple passages from the King James Bible and then "translate" them into poor English to show the clarity and brilliance of the original.
Six rules
Orwell conceded it was easy for his contemporaries to slip into bad writing of the sort he describes, and says the temptation to use meaningless or hackneyed phrases was like a "packet of aspirins always at one's elbow." In particular, they are always ready to form the writer's thoughts for him to save him the bother of thinking, or writing, clearly. However, he concludes the progress of bad writing is reversible and offers the reader six rules he says will help them avoid most of the errors in the examples of poor writing he gave earlier in the article:
John Rodden claims, given much of Orwell's work was polemical, he sometimes violated these rules and Orwell himself concedes he has no doubt violated some of them in the very essay in which they were included.
Poor writing and political justification of inhumane activities
Elsewhere in the essay, Orwell examined what he believed to be a close association between bad prose and inhumane ideology:
Orwell comments:
Critical reception
In Orwell's authorized biography, Michael Shelden calls it "his most influential essay." Terry Eagleton praised its demystification of political language, although he later became disenchanted with Orwell. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum criticized the essay for "its insane and unfollowable insistence that good writing must avoid all phrases and word uses that are familiar."
See also
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
- Original text:
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- , which cites source as Horizon, April 1946
- Reformatted for online reading and printing
h Language by George Orwell")
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