Politics and the English Language

1946

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. Our civilization is decadent and our

language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general

collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a

sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom

cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that

language is a natural 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 same effect in an

intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he

feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because

he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English

language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because out thoughts are foolish,

but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish

thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English,

especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation

and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If

one gets rid of these 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 is not the exclusive concern

of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope 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

habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad

-- I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they

illustrate various of the mental vices 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 once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not

become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien

[sic] to the founder of that Jesuit 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 which prescribes 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 it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as

they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional

approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional

pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in 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-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not

this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in

this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York )

4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic

fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial

horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have

turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval

legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of

proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to

chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary

way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one

thorny and contentious 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 the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and

of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is

like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night'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

the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as

"standard English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock,

better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly

dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish

arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from

avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is

staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has

a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something 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 of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of

political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts

into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are

not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of

their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the

sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I list below, with notes and examples,

various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is

habitually dodged:

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

visual image, 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. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up

the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to

shoulder with, 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 used without knowledge of their meaning

(what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently

mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.

Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning

withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe

the line is sometimes written as tow the line . Another example is the

hammer and the anvil , now always used with the implication that the anvil

gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the

hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was

saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out

appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with

extra syllables which give it an appearance 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, play a

leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency

to, serve the purpose of, etc.,etc . The keynote is the elimination of

simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil,

mend, kill , a verb becomes a phrase , made up of a noun 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

the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by

examination of instead of by 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 of the not un- formation. Simple

conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as 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 such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired,

cannot be left out of account, a development 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 aire of scientific impartiality to

biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic,

unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable , are

used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing

that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its

characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident,

sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion . Foreign words and

expressions such as cul de sac, ancien r&eacutgime, deus ex machina, mutatis

mutandis, status quo, 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 the hundreds of foreign

phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially

scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted

by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and

unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous,

deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous , and hundreds of others constantly

gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist

writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey,

flunkey, mad dog, White Guard , etc.) consists largely of words translated

from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is

to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary,

the size formation. It is often 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's meaning. The

result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art

criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages

which are almost completely lacking in 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 do

not 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 peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this

as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved,

instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that

language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are

similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it

signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism,

freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different

meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word

like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to

make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when

we call a country 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 word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

Words of this kind are often used in a consciously 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. Statements like Marshal

Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The

Catholic 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

another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must

of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good

English into modern English of the 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 the strong, neither yet bread to the

wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to

men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the

conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities

exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but

that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably

be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance,

contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I

have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence

follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete

illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve into the vague phrases

"success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so, because

no 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 away from 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 everyday life. The

second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those

words are 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 contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and

in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the

meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second 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 occur here and there in the worst-written page. 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. As I have tried to show, modern writing at its

worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning

and 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, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The

attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even

quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an

unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made

phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't

have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are

generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are

composing in a hurry -- when you are dictating to a stenographer, for

instance, or making a public speech -- it is natural to fall into a

pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do

well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent

will save many a sentence 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 your reader but for yourself. This

is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to

call up a visual image. When these images clash -- as in The Fascist octopus

has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it

can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the

objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again

at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1)

uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous,

making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip --

alien for akin -- making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of

clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays

ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and,

while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look

egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (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 in which

it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but

an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink.

In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in

this manner usually have a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one

thing and want to express solidarity with another -- but they are not

interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, 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 your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come

crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you -- even think your

thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the

important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the

debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where

it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of

rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of

whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political

dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White

papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party

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, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world,

stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is

not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which

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. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of

phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.

The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not

involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the

speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over

again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one

utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if

not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

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. Consider for

instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian

totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your

opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore,

he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain

features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we

must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to

political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional

periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been

called upon 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 the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up

all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When

there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, 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 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.

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. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some

ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves

much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, 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 for

certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults

I am protesting 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 at random, and here is almost the first

sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a

radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a

way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same

time of laying 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 his words, like cavalry horses answering the

bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar 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 constantly on

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 this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that

language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot

influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and

constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this

may 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 a minority. 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 themselves in 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 foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general,

to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The

defense of the English language implies 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 words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard

English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is

especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has

outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and

syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear,

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 to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply

in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does

imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the

other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is

surrender to them. When yo think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly,

and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you

probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When

you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the

start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing

dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of

blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off

using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can

through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply

accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch

round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to mak on another

person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all

prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness

generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a

phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I

think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are

used to seeing in print.

2. Never us 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 of an 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 attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now

fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one

could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted 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 an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or

preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that

all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for

advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism

is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such

absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political

chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably

bring about some improvement by starting 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 make a stupid remark its

stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. 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, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot

change this all in a moment, but one can at least change 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,

melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse --

into the dustbin, where it belongs.

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