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I detest this essay. I won't go too far into the reasons why, because David Beaver has already done an excellent job of that: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/n

by tkfu 10y ago

I detest this essay. I won't go too far into the reasons why, because David Beaver has already done an excellent job of that: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992 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/elimination-of-the-fittest/ 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.

iso-8859-1 10y ago
Beaver is nitpicking. See https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/7oprg/orwells_politics_and_the_english_language_is_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/7oprg/orwells_poli...
zoul 10y ago
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?)
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  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.
atombender 10y ago
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. [1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/27/honest-decent-wrong http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/27/honest-decent-w...
qntty 10y ago
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. And indeed he does.

by tkfu 10y ago

iso-8859-1 10y ago

Beaver is nitpicking. See https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/7oprg/orwells_politics_and_the_english_language_is_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/7oprg/orwells_poli...

zoul 10y ago

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?)

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
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.

atombender 10y ago

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. [1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/27/honest-decent-wrong http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/27/honest-decent-w...

qntty 10y ago

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. And indeed he does.