9 ms·

George Orwell: Politics and the English Language (1946)

206 points by yk 13y ago

codezero 13y ago
I wonder what he'd say about memes. They seem to be the ultimate self-reinforcing de-evolution of language. In many ways, it seems like he is talking about memes, just the memes of his own time. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
- pavlov 13y ago
  I don't know about that. At least memes don't pretend to be anything else than they are. They are the unabashed verbal and visual equivalent of musical jingles, things designed to grab your attention and stick in your head, but nobody is suggesting that jingles are equivalent to Beethoven. Corporate PowerPoint-talk is the spiritual heir of what Orwell is mocking in his rewrite of the Old Testament passage. An ever-growing wall of "strategic" abstractions and vaguely Latin buzzwords is used to hide the debilitating lack of meaning and power that plagues the days of almost every mid-level manager at any established company.
  - codezero 13y ago
    I agree they aren't intended to be high quality, but because of their ease of use and mimicry, they are often used in place of actually formulating a thought or statement which is similar to the themes in Orwell's piece. 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.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  When people say "epic", I hear "doubleplusgood". When I'm a bad mood I can't even stand "awesome"... it's used way to often, and rarely for things that inspire awe even in the speaker.
- benched 13y ago
  It depends what you mean by meme. In the original sense as used by Richard Dawkins, yes, hackneyed phrases are memes. But the now-common usage, as in Internet meme is more specific than that. It's more like an inside nerd joke - the kind that is supposed to get funnier with relentless repetition.
jfasi 13y ago
If you're as turned off by the formatting of this page as I am, I'm currently working on a CSS framework to beautifully display longform text. As luck would have it, this essay was my test case: http://alexgolec.github.io/orwell/politics http://alexgolec.github.io/orwell/politics
- somebehemoth 13y ago
  Lovely.
- codezero 13y ago
  This looks great, thanks!
- TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
  Wow, amazing! :)
- jsnk 13y ago
  You need left margin or left padding. It's really awkward without it. Also max-width on the content please. edit: Thanks for the update. Looks really nice.
- devx 13y ago
  On Chrome you can use an extension like iReader to format it nicely: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ireader/ppelffpjgkifjfgnbaaldcehkpajlmbc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ireader/ppelffpjgk... Yours does look a little nicer, though. You should make it an extension.
- mparramon 13y ago
  it looks really nice! is there a way to see the source code on github or similar?
- daragh 13y ago
  This is gorgeous.
- nkuttler 13y ago
  I was surprised to read this comment because the post links... to your page. What was the original link?
Cyranix 13y ago
> one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin, where it belongs. Such a fitting sentence on which to end the essay, since "dustbin" is no longer part of the modern English lexicon, as far as I know.
- lsb 13y ago
  It is the posh word for the American "trash can", still in active use.
- gojomo 13y ago
  Google N-Gram analysis suggests otherwise, with dustbin more common in books in 2000 than the 1940s/1950s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dustbin%2Cwastebasket%2Ctrash+can&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdustbin%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwastebasket%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctrash%20can%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dustbin%2Cwast... However, it has be losing in relative rank to 'trash can'. I believe dustbin is far more common in British English than North American English.
  - Cyranix 13y ago
    Many thanks to you and the other replies for increasing my linguistic cultural awareness!
- baddox 13y ago
  I think it's fairly common in British English.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  "dustbin" isn't a catchphrase.
- erehweb 13y ago
  Definitely part of British English, and also an allusion to the phrase "dustbin of history".
mceoin 13y ago
This was my first ever reading assignment at university, for an International Relations class of all things! I spent the next 5 years introducing it to others as a a precursor to any copy-editing sessions.
gruseom 13y ago
The more I read Orwell's essays of the 1940s the more they seem like a master class in how to write, which means they are also a master class in how to think. The combination of clarity and impact in his style is so powerful that it's actually shocking. Moreover, it seems to be aging very well, so Orwell's reputation (specifically for this) has been steadily increasing. Other great examples: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose Is anyone writing today with that particular quality (i.e. that combination of clarity and directness)? All the candidates I can think of fall far short of it, and only clarify how distinctive Orwell is. Edit: It's also interesting that this material is now widely seen as classic when at the time it was mere pamphleteering. To my knowledge, Orwell wasn't thought of as a hack—he was respected—but this sort of writing was regarded, even by him, as throwaway work, with a sense that it was too bad that circumstances didn't allow him to do better. (He touches on that in "Why I Write", the first link above.) It's a common theme in the history of art for high-status things to start out as low-status things; this may be a case of that. Edit 2: Another interesting thing—he was writing this stuff about current events in more or less real time. That's a very murky pond to be looking into. I would very much like to know what it was that gave Orwell that degree of insight.
- swordswinger12 13y ago
  If you're like me and prefer reading print books, there's an excellent (and very comprehensive) collection of Orwell's letters, essays and journalism. It's slightly difficult to track down but worth the effort. http://www.godine.com/search.asp?search=orwell http://www.godine.com/search.asp?search=orwell
  - gruseom 13y ago
    Thanks! I've been looking for something just like this and ended up getting stuck in a maze—there are a lot of uncompelling editions out there. I'm going to try to track this one down.
  - dionidium 13y ago
ribs 13y ago
I've admired this essay of Orwell's since I first read it years ago, and have striven to shed stale metaphors and pretense from my writing ever since. I wonder how well I have succeeded.
chillax 13y ago
Well, this is perhaps the way we should write code too: "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?"
benhamner 13y ago
One of my favorite essays. I re-read this every six months as a reminder to be as clear and precise as possible in my communication.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
spangled 13y ago
I wonder what Orwell would make of terms from his own works being used in these ways.
l33tbro 13y ago
Surprised to see such a seminal essay on the top of HN. I'm sure most people here will have read this before ... but, hey, always a good re-read.
- svachalek 13y ago
  How old do you think the average HN reader is? Or is this covered in some kind of CS class?
  - l33tbro 13y ago
    I think the average user on this site is pretty literate. Easily a quarter of the top posts are non-CS related.
- MaysonL 13y ago
  It happens fairly often: See the previous submissions: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Orwell+language&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Orwell...
comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
"The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation." Obviously, we need to deincentivize that. "one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin, where it belongs."
- derleth 13y ago
  > into the dustbin The irony being that this is one of the worst kind of cliches, proving that Orwell had no idea what he was talking about.
shadowfiend 13y ago
I'm about to go do something, but wanted to be somewhat critical; the result will probably be a bit all over the place and incoherent: The irony of this post, of course, is that it decries the evolution of language while praising the evolved parts of the language. Orwell says, ‘… while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead” (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ This as if dead metaphors simply materialized overnight, and never lived in the middle class. Unsurprisingly, several of the “dying metaphors” he cites are at this point in time essentially dead (Achilles' heel and hotbed, for instance). He leads with “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.” It's immediately evident, I suppose, that Orwell is a writer, not a scientist. Who is defined as bothering with the matter at all? “Most” is quite the weasel word, isn't it? A case study in phrasing things in a way that you can't really disagree with them. I'm a self-and-by-others-described lover the English language, and misuse and misspelling of words and phrases annoys me as much as text that is too complicated to follow, but I don't think it means the “English language is in a bad way”, any more than it did then. But then I'm simply not one of the “most”, I suppose, by virtue of disagreeing. “Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.” Let's grant that the language is declining. Is this assertion really clear? To whom is this clear? It's certainly not clear to me. It isn't clear that either side is true, or that it is false: indeed, the decline, or evolution, as I would put it, of language is likely inextricably intertwined with politics and economics and technological evolution and society. He addresses this immediately after, saying “But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely”, and in doing so he renders his previous statement pointless, filler, not a meaningless word but a meaningless phrase! To boot, he says: “Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority.” His hope for curing the language is the conscious action of a minority, but the decline of language cannot be due to the bad influence of a minority? Orwell makes good points at times here, I think, with respect to overly ornate language that does nothing to clarify its own content. And he gives some reasonable guidelines to boot. But he extrapolates these smaller conclusions to bigger ones that are unlikely to be true, and presents them in a such a way that you don't realize that he's weaseling out of truly concluding anything—he simply postulates. Even when he does make good points about using language to defend the indefensible, the idea that this is some sort of novel discovery that was particularly bad in the 40s—or is now—is unfathomably foolish. “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.” What is deterioration, pray tell? What makes a language worse? Did a change in instruments in the second half of the twentieth century make our music worse? Our great musicians? Did the emergence of Ruby or Python make our programs worse? Our programmers? By what metric? Really investigating the concept of worse or better when it comes to such abstract things as language is incredibly difficult. Distinguishing worse from different is incredibly difficult unless maybe you're comparing two things that were conceived at the exact same moment—and even then, your judgement is specific to the now, not to forever. “Look back through this essay,” Orwell says self-deprecatingly, “and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.” Conveniently, this makes 90% of the essay immune to criticism. Another weaseling. “Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists.” I'm afraid I must report to Mr Orwell that 67 years later, these metaphors are alive and well—or, more likely, dead. Is our English today “worse” than it was 50 years ago? If not, was it a small cadre of noble writers who saved us? If the decline of language was arrested, was that because the language stopped declining, or simply because on this end, decline doesn't really look like decline—just movement? And if it is worse, then how? All of the complaints he's making seem to be equally valid today, but not particularly more so. People have been trying to make points without having to really justify themselves for ages, and they will continue to for many years to come. It happens in politics, yes. But it seems that it also happens in essays about politics and the English language.
peg_leg 13y ago
This has always been one of my favorite essays.
tadmilbourn 13y ago
I try to read this once a year to jolt myself out of my typical writing. Another useful tip is to have "The Elements of Style" by Strunk & White nearby.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
finin 13y ago
This post on Language Log identifies ways in which Orwell violated his own rules in the essay. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992
dobbsbob 13y ago
Timely post, considering the insanity I was just handed by my campus Social Justice society on my way inside the student union building. It's full of newspeak, and openly calls for the suppression and censorship of speech, literature and music on campus and contains unclear/vague threats of punishment to anybody "who benefits from promoting patriarchal attitudes and relations of power that were inflicted here by colonists."
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Colonists? Where do you live?
intellegacy 13y ago
Schopenhauer said it 200 years before Orwell did, a fact I discovered only this week. I recommend Schopenhauer's essay if you liked this one. Read essays 1-3 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/ http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/
reubenswartz 13y ago
One of my favorite essays and even more relevant today than when Orwell wrote it. ("Enemy combatants", "right-sizing", "Patriot Act") I think the effect in business is even greater, partly because the bar for good business speech and writing is so low. I wrote a post inspired by Orwell's essay called How Your High School English Teacher is Ruining Your Proposals to vent my frustration over language that obfuscates rather than clarifies, whether intentionally or just due to laziness. (http://www.mimiran.com/proposals/how-your-high-school-english-class-is-ruining-your-proposals/ http://www.mimiran.com/proposals/how-your-high-school-englis...)
Eorge_Gorwell 13y ago
Politics and the English Language [with annotations from a rational thinker] http://pastebin.com/mSzbX5Hd http://pastebin.com/mSzbX5Hd

206 points by yk 13y ago

I wonder what he'd say about memes. They seem to be the ultimate self-reinforcing de-evolution of language. In many ways, it seems like he is talking about memes, just the memes of his own time. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

pavlov 13y ago
I don't know about that. At least memes don't pretend to be anything else than they are. They are the unabashed verbal and visual equivalent of musical jingles, things designed to grab your attention and stick in your head, but nobody is suggesting that jingles are equivalent to Beethoven. Corporate PowerPoint-talk is the spiritual heir of what Orwell is mocking in his rewrite of the Old Testament passage. An ever-growing wall of "strategic" abstractions and vaguely Latin buzzwords is used to hide the debilitating lack of meaning and power that plagues the days of almost every mid-level manager at any established company.
- codezero 13y ago
  I agree they aren't intended to be high quality, but because of their ease of use and mimicry, they are often used in place of actually formulating a thought or statement which is similar to the themes in Orwell's piece. 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.
PavlovsCat 13y ago
When people say "epic", I hear "doubleplusgood". When I'm a bad mood I can't even stand "awesome"... it's used way to often, and rarely for things that inspire awe even in the speaker.
benched 13y ago
It depends what you mean by meme. In the original sense as used by Richard Dawkins, yes, hackneyed phrases are memes. But the now-common usage, as in Internet meme is more specific than that. It's more like an inside nerd joke - the kind that is supposed to get funnier with relentless repetition.

jfasi 13y ago

If you're as turned off by the formatting of this page as I am, I'm currently working on a CSS framework to beautifully display longform text. As luck would have it, this essay was my test case: http://alexgolec.github.io/orwell/politics http://alexgolec.github.io/orwell/politics

somebehemoth 13y ago
Lovely.
codezero 13y ago
This looks great, thanks!
TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
Wow, amazing! :)
jsnk 13y ago
You need left margin or left padding. It's really awkward without it. Also max-width on the content please. edit: Thanks for the update. Looks really nice.
devx 13y ago
On Chrome you can use an extension like iReader to format it nicely: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ireader/ppelffpjgkifjfgnbaaldcehkpajlmbc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ireader/ppelffpjgk... Yours does look a little nicer, though. You should make it an extension.
mparramon 13y ago
it looks really nice! is there a way to see the source code on github or similar?
daragh 13y ago
This is gorgeous.
nkuttler 13y ago
I was surprised to read this comment because the post links... to your page. What was the original link?

Cyranix 13y ago

> one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin, where it belongs. Such a fitting sentence on which to end the essay, since "dustbin" is no longer part of the modern English lexicon, as far as I know.

lsb 13y ago
It is the posh word for the American "trash can", still in active use.
gojomo 13y ago
Google N-Gram analysis suggests otherwise, with dustbin more common in books in 2000 than the 1940s/1950s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dustbin%2Cwastebasket%2Ctrash+can&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdustbin%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwastebasket%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctrash%20can%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dustbin%2Cwast... However, it has be losing in relative rank to 'trash can'. I believe dustbin is far more common in British English than North American English.
- Cyranix 13y ago
  Many thanks to you and the other replies for increasing my linguistic cultural awareness!
baddox 13y ago
I think it's fairly common in British English.
sliverstorm 13y ago
"dustbin" isn't a catchphrase.
erehweb 13y ago
Definitely part of British English, and also an allusion to the phrase "dustbin of history".

mceoin 13y ago

This was my first ever reading assignment at university, for an International Relations class of all things! I spent the next 5 years introducing it to others as a a precursor to any copy-editing sessions.

gruseom 13y ago

The more I read Orwell's essays of the 1940s the more they seem like a master class in how to write, which means they are also a master class in how to think. The combination of clarity and impact in his style is so powerful that it's actually shocking. Moreover, it seems to be aging very well, so Orwell's reputation (specifically for this) has been steadily increasing. Other great examples: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose Is anyone writing today with that particular quality (i.e. that combination of clarity and directness)? All the candidates I can think of fall far short of it, and only clarify how distinctive Orwell is. Edit: It's also interesting that this material is now widely seen as classic when at the time it was mere pamphleteering. To my knowledge, Orwell wasn't thought of as a hack—he was respected—but this sort of writing was regarded, even by him, as throwaway work, with a sense that it was too bad that circumstances didn't allow him to do better. (He touches on that in "Why I Write", the first link above.) It's a common theme in the history of art for high-status things to start out as low-status things; this may be a case of that. Edit 2: Another interesting thing—he was writing this stuff about current events in more or less real time. That's a very murky pond to be looking into. I would very much like to know what it was that gave Orwell that degree of insight.

swordswinger12 13y ago
If you're like me and prefer reading print books, there's an excellent (and very comprehensive) collection of Orwell's letters, essays and journalism. It's slightly difficult to track down but worth the effort. http://www.godine.com/search.asp?search=orwell http://www.godine.com/search.asp?search=orwell
- gruseom 13y ago
  Thanks! I've been looking for something just like this and ended up getting stuck in a maze—there are a lot of uncompelling editions out there. I'm going to try to track this one down.
- dionidium 13y ago

ribs 13y ago

I've admired this essay of Orwell's since I first read it years ago, and have striven to shed stale metaphors and pretense from my writing ever since. I wonder how well I have succeeded.

chillax 13y ago

Well, this is perhaps the way we should write code too: "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?"

benhamner 13y ago

One of my favorite essays. I re-read this every six months as a reminder to be as clear and precise as possible in my communication.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

spangled 13y ago

I wonder what Orwell would make of terms from his own works being used in these ways.

l33tbro 13y ago

Surprised to see such a seminal essay on the top of HN. I'm sure most people here will have read this before ... but, hey, always a good re-read.

svachalek 13y ago
How old do you think the average HN reader is? Or is this covered in some kind of CS class?
- l33tbro 13y ago
  I think the average user on this site is pretty literate. Easily a quarter of the top posts are non-CS related.
MaysonL 13y ago
It happens fairly often: See the previous submissions: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Orwell+language&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Orwell...

comrade_ogilvy 13y ago

"The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation." Obviously, we need to deincentivize that. "one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin, where it belongs."

derleth 13y ago
> into the dustbin The irony being that this is one of the worst kind of cliches, proving that Orwell had no idea what he was talking about.

shadowfiend 13y ago

I'm about to go do something, but wanted to be somewhat critical; the result will probably be a bit all over the place and incoherent: The irony of this post, of course, is that it decries the evolution of language while praising the evolved parts of the language. Orwell says, ‘… while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead” (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ This as if dead metaphors simply materialized overnight, and never lived in the middle class. Unsurprisingly, several of the “dying metaphors” he cites are at this point in time essentially dead (Achilles' heel and hotbed, for instance). He leads with “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.” It's immediately evident, I suppose, that Orwell is a writer, not a scientist. Who is defined as bothering with the matter at all? “Most” is quite the weasel word, isn't it? A case study in phrasing things in a way that you can't really disagree with them. I'm a self-and-by-others-described lover the English language, and misuse and misspelling of words and phrases annoys me as much as text that is too complicated to follow, but I don't think it means the “English language is in a bad way”, any more than it did then. But then I'm simply not one of the “most”, I suppose, by virtue of disagreeing. “Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.” Let's grant that the language is declining. Is this assertion really clear? To whom is this clear? It's certainly not clear to me. It isn't clear that either side is true, or that it is false: indeed, the decline, or evolution, as I would put it, of language is likely inextricably intertwined with politics and economics and technological evolution and society. He addresses this immediately after, saying “But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely”, and in doing so he renders his previous statement pointless, filler, not a meaningless word but a meaningless phrase! To boot, he says: “Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority.” His hope for curing the language is the conscious action of a minority, but the decline of language cannot be due to the bad influence of a minority? Orwell makes good points at times here, I think, with respect to overly ornate language that does nothing to clarify its own content. And he gives some reasonable guidelines to boot. But he extrapolates these smaller conclusions to bigger ones that are unlikely to be true, and presents them in a such a way that you don't realize that he's weaseling out of truly concluding anything—he simply postulates. Even when he does make good points about using language to defend the indefensible, the idea that this is some sort of novel discovery that was particularly bad in the 40s—or is now—is unfathomably foolish. “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.” What is deterioration, pray tell? What makes a language worse? Did a change in instruments in the second half of the twentieth century make our music worse? Our great musicians? Did the emergence of Ruby or Python make our programs worse? Our programmers? By what metric? Really investigating the concept of worse or better when it comes to such abstract things as language is incredibly difficult. Distinguishing worse from different is incredibly difficult unless maybe you're comparing two things that were conceived at the exact same moment—and even then, your judgement is specific to the now, not to forever. “Look back through this essay,” Orwell says self-deprecatingly, “and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.” Conveniently, this makes 90% of the essay immune to criticism. Another weaseling. “Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists.” I'm afraid I must report to Mr Orwell that 67 years later, these metaphors are alive and well—or, more likely, dead. Is our English today “worse” than it was 50 years ago? If not, was it a small cadre of noble writers who saved us? If the decline of language was arrested, was that because the language stopped declining, or simply because on this end, decline doesn't really look like decline—just movement? And if it is worse, then how? All of the complaints he's making seem to be equally valid today, but not particularly more so. People have been trying to make points without having to really justify themselves for ages, and they will continue to for many years to come. It happens in politics, yes. But it seems that it also happens in essays about politics and the English language.

peg_leg 13y ago

This has always been one of my favorite essays.

tadmilbourn 13y ago

I try to read this once a year to jolt myself out of my typical writing. Another useful tip is to have "The Elements of Style" by Strunk & White nearby.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

finin 13y ago

This post on Language Log identifies ways in which Orwell violated his own rules in the essay. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992

dobbsbob 13y ago

Timely post, considering the insanity I was just handed by my campus Social Justice society on my way inside the student union building. It's full of newspeak, and openly calls for the suppression and censorship of speech, literature and music on campus and contains unclear/vague threats of punishment to anybody "who benefits from promoting patriarchal attitudes and relations of power that were inflicted here by colonists."

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Colonists? Where do you live?

intellegacy 13y ago

Schopenhauer said it 200 years before Orwell did, a fact I discovered only this week. I recommend Schopenhauer's essay if you liked this one. Read essays 1-3 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/ http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/

reubenswartz 13y ago

One of my favorite essays and even more relevant today than when Orwell wrote it. ("Enemy combatants", "right-sizing", "Patriot Act") I think the effect in business is even greater, partly because the bar for good business speech and writing is so low. I wrote a post inspired by Orwell's essay called How Your High School English Teacher is Ruining Your Proposals to vent my frustration over language that obfuscates rather than clarifies, whether intentionally or just due to laziness. (http://www.mimiran.com/proposals/how-your-high-school-english-class-is-ruining-your-proposals/ http://www.mimiran.com/proposals/how-your-high-school-englis...)

Eorge_Gorwell 13y ago

Politics and the English Language [with annotations from a rational thinker] http://pastebin.com/mSzbX5Hd http://pastebin.com/mSzbX5Hd