Politics and English language

by George Orwell

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is ina bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anythingabout it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- mustinevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse oflanguage is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansomcabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is anatural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

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.But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the sameeffect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because hefeels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It israther the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and

inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes iteasier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. ModernEnglish, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation andwhich can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid ofthese habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step

toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and isnot the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and Ihope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer.Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habituallywritten.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I couldhave quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mentalvices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly

representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who onceseemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of anexperience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of thatJesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate. - Professor Harold Laski(Essay in Freedom of Expression)2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms whichprescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate,or put at a loss for bewilder. - Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia )3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for ithas neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for

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they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness;another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is littlein them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side,the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secureintegrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a smallacademic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality orfraternity? - Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)

4. All the \"best people\" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascistcaptains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the risingtide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, tofoul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their owndestruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise tochauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of thecrisis. - Communist pamphlet5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny andcontentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and

galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of thesoul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but theBritish lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A MidsummerNight's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot

continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by theeffete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as \"standard English.\"When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely lessludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated,inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens! -Letter in TribuneEach of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, twoqualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack ofprecision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently sayssomething else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic ofmodern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certaintopics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think ofturns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen forthe sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sectionsof a prefabricated henhouse. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricksby means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visualimage, 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 usedwithout 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

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people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changeson, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulderwith, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters,on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed . Many of these are usedwithout knowledge of their meaning (what is a \"rift,\" for instance?), and incompatiblemetaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he issaying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaningwithout those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line issometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, nowalways used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is alwaysthe anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped tothink what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbsand nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it anappearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against,make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, playa leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve thepurpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being asingle word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of anoun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form,play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to theactive, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead ofby examining). 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 ofthe not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrasesas with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of,on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by suchresounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, adevelopment to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration,brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective,categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize,eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientificimpartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic,

unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignifythe sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying warusually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot,mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words andexpressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, statusquo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung , are used to give an air of culture and elegance.Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g. and etc., there is no real need for any of thehundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and

especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by thenotion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words

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like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, andhundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers. The jargonpeculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry,lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated fromRussian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latinor Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It isoften easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital,non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one'smeaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literarycriticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lackingin meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural,vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only donot point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.When one critic writes, \"The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality,\"while another writes, \"The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiardeadness,\" the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black andwhite were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at oncethat language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarlyabused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies \"somethingnot desirable.\" The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice haveeach of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. Inthe case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attemptto make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call acountry democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of

regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that wordif it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in aconsciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private

definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statementslike Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, TheCatholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to

deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly,are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give anotherexample of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be animaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English ofthe worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to thestrong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yetfavour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

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Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion thatsuccess or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensuratewith innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable mustinvariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, containsseveral patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a fulltranslation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairlyclosely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve intothe vague phrases \"success or failure in competitive activities.\" This had to be so, becauseno modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable of using phrases like\"objective considerations of contemporary phenomena\" -- would ever tabulate his

thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is awayfrom concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first

contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everydaylife. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those wordsare from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images,and only one phrase (\"time and chance\") that could be called vague. The second containsnot a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only ashortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is thesecond kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to

exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occurhere and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines onthe uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my

imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes. As I have tried to show, modernwriting at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaningand 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, andmaking the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing isthat it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinionit is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-madephrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have tobother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arrangedas to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry -- when you aredictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech -- it is natural to fallinto a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well tobear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many asentence 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 yourreader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of ametaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash -- as in The Fascistoctopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can betaken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; inother words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning

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of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these issuperfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip --alien for akin -- making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsinesswhich increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes witha battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everydayphrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what itmeans; (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 inwhich it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but anaccumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), wordsand meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually havea general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity withanother -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulouswriter, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?2. What words will express it?

3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?

2. 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 yourmind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will constructyour sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and atneed they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning evenfrom yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and thedebasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, itwill generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his privateopinions and not a \"party line.\" Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand alifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles,manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary fromparty to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid,homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform

mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstainedtyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curiousfeeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feelingwhich 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. Andthis is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gonesome distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming

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out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing hiswords for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make overand over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when oneutters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if notindispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence 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 argumentswhich are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professedaims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism,question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded fromthe air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, thehuts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants arerobbed 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 foryears without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arcticlumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology isneeded if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Considerfor instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. Hecannot say outright, \"I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get goodresults by doing so.\" Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which thehumanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certaincurtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant oftransitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been calledupon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon thefacts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemyof clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declaredaims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a

cuttlefish spurting 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 shouldexpect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that theGerman, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteenyears, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage canspread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. Thedebased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phraseslike a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no goodpurpose, 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

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for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I amprotesting 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 atrandom, and here is almost the first sentence I see: \"[The Allies] have an opportunity notonly of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure insuch a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time oflaying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.\" You see, he \"feels

impelled\" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has something new to say -- and yet hiswords, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into thefamiliar 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 constantlyon guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny thiswould argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existingsocial conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkeringwith words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, thismay 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 aminority. 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 flyblown

metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselvesin the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence,to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreignphrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness

unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English languageimplies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete wordsand turns of speech, or with the setting up of a \"standard English\" which must never bedeparted from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of everyword or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correctgrammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaningclear, 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 tomake written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring theSaxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest wordsthat will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose theword, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words issurrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then,if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about untilyou find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you aremore inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort toprevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expenseof blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words aslong as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and

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sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will bestcover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words arelikely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixedimages, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vaguenessgenerally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and oneneeds rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will covermost cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used toseeing in print.2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think ofan everyday English equivalent.6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitudein anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keepall of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that Iquoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as aninstrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase andothers have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have usedthis as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know whatFascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such

absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connectedwith the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement bystarting 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 makea stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- andwith variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- isdesigned to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearanceof solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at leastchange 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, meltingpot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where itbelongs.

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