About a month ago, I wrote a column about George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and the recent controversy surrounding the NSA surveillance of millions of Americans. That piece elicited more reader response than any other I have published in this space, so today I am serving up a second helping of Orwell.
“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer,” George Orwell recorded, and his life was one long preparation for the writing of his most enduring work, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” But before that, in 1946, Orwell wrote “Politics and the English Language,” which has become the most reprinted of all English essays. In it he exposes the parlous condition of the English language and the prevalent diseases that afflict it: “Modern English 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 hen-house.”
Orwell catalogs various types of rhetorical “swindles and perversions,” concluding that “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 squirting out ink.” As an example of the kind of ink verbal insincerity can so easily spew, Orwell quotes a well-known verse from biblical 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 favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to all of them.
Then the essayist presents a version of the passage with its life blood drained away and replaced by the embalming fluid of modern English style:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels 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.
The biblical passage contains 60 syllables, the “translation” 90. Yet which version, asks Orwell, seems fresher and more vivid? More telling, which seems closer to the kind of speech and writing we encounter in modern times?
Orwell doesn’t just complain. He states that “the decadence of our language is probably curable” and ends his essay by suggesting a number of remedies to help restore the language to a healthier state. For a set of rules for plain talk and clear writing, it would be difficult to better these six offered in “Politics and the English Language.” If we all followed these guidelines, our prose might not be as able as Orwell’s, but it would be more to the point:
- Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Despite Orwell’s abbreviated life of 46 years, he pervades our thoughts and our vocabulary. The adjective Orwellian, the four neutral numbers 1984 and the catchphrase “Big Brother Is Watching You” have been branded so long on public consciousness that they have acquired the power of symbols for totalitarianism and repression.
Wrote Laurence Brander, Orwell’s colleague at the BBC, “He had one gift, which will be the envy of all who study him: the gift of writing prose. He had the character to preserve that gift and to use it for the benefit of society.”
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com