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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 indefen
by Houshalter 10y ago
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.
- ndr 10y ago(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. He surely used a lot of passive in this part!
- crdoconnor 10y agoI interpreted this a a kind of ironic allusion to the kind of writing he was castigating.
- sevensor 10y agoI 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.
- pdabbadabba 10y ago> 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. Mistakes were made.
- dllthomas 10y ago"Mistakes were made by Jeff and later Cindy" uses the passive and is quite clear about agency. "A bomb exploded near midtown" uses the active but tells us nothing about who was responsible. If we care about clarity of agency, we should look for it, not poor proxies.
- pdabbadabba 10y agoYou'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.
- dllthomas 10y agoI 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.
- pdabbadabba 10y agoFair 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.
- dllthomas 10y ago
- igravious 10y agoStephen 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.”
- Natsu 10y agoThis 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.
- oxymoron 10y agoStephen 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_.
- wangchow 10y agoReminds me of the "nuisance abatement vehicles" used for controlling riots
- meffie 10y agoI have the sudden urge to run a game of Paranoia.
- dllthomas 10y agoYOU ARE IN ERROR. NO ONE IS SCREAMING. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.
- stinkytaco 10y agoWow, I had forgotten that game. I don't think I ever played it, but the rule books were awesome.
- pjc50 10y ago"Collateral damage" "Regime change"
- judah 10y agoSome modern examples: capital punishment, euthanasia, abortion. All involve killing a human being, but euphemisms are used to soften the reality.
- alanwatts 10y ago"Enhanced interrogation"
- mfoy_ 10y agoGeorge Carlin had an excellent bit on this topic as well. He called it "soft language".
- eumoria 10y agoHis example of "Shell Shock" to "Battle Fatigue" to "Operational Exhaustion" to "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" is a wonderful analysis of language. Shell shock almost sounds like the bombs themselves. SHELL SHOCK. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and all the humanity has been ripped out of it.
- enraged_camel 10y agoI 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.
- logfromblammo 10y ago~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.~ /s
- kahrkunne 10y agoI'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.
- digitalarborist 10y agoThis 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.