Politics and the English Language

Summary

Politics and the English Language is an essay of about five thousand words by George Orwell, first published in the London literary monthly Horizon in April 1946, in the months after the Second World War when he was beginning Nineteen Eighty-Four. It argues that careless English and dishonest politics feed each other, and that the process can be reversed by writers who take trouble over their words. Because the essay is under copyright, the library holds this description, a guide and two short verified quotations, but not the text. Orwell opens by granting that most people think the language is in decline and that nothing can be done. He agrees that the causes are political and economic, but compares the decline to a man who drinks because he feels himself a failure and then fails all the more because he drinks: bad habits of language make foolish thoughts easier, and foolish thoughts make the language worse. He then sets out five specimens of contemporary prose, two of them by the professors Harold Laski and Lancelot Hogben, and the others from an essay on psychology in an American journal, a Communist pamphlet and a letter to Tribune. All five, he says, share stale imagery and a lack of precision. The central section catalogues the tricks by which writers avoid the work of thinking. Dying metaphors are used without regard to their meaning. Operators, or verbal false limbs, pad out a simple verb into a phrase. Pretentious diction dresses ordinary statements in foreign, Latinate or scientific words. Meaningless words, common in criticism and politics, such as democracy, freedom and fascism, have no agreed sense. To show the effect, Orwell rewrites a famous verse of Ecclesiastes, about the race not going to the swift, in the abstract jargon of modern social science. He describes modern prose as ready-made phrases glued together, and proposes questions a scrupulous writer should ask of every sentence. The essay then turns to politics. Political speech and writing, Orwell argues, are largely the defence of what cannot be defended openly: bombing villages is called pacification, and imprisonment and execution become the elimination of unreliable elements. Vague, euphemistic language lets a writer say what he would not say plainly, and insincerity is the great enemy of clarity. Orwell confesses that his own essay surely contains the faults it attacks, and suggests memorizing a sentence of absurd not-un- phrases as a cure for one of them. He closes with six rules, beginning with avoiding familiar figures of speech and long words where short ones will serve, and ending with permission to break any of them rather than write something barbarous. One cannot change the world's language at once, he concludes, but one can change one's own habits and throw worn-out phrases away. The essay has been reprinted in countless anthologies and is widely taught in courses on writing and rhetoric.

Top Lessons

• Clear words make clear thoughts possible

  Orwell argues that language is not only a mirror of thought but a tool that shapes it. A writer who lets ready-made phrases assemble his sentences ends by not knowing exactly what he thinks. Choosing each word deliberately is a discipline of the mind as well as of style.

• Euphemism can hide wrongdoing

  In the political section Orwell shows how vague, Latinate phrases let writers describe violence without calling up its picture. Naming things plainly is therefore a moral act, because it lets readers see what is actually being proposed or defended.

• Rules serve judgment

  Orwell's six rules end with a rule permitting the writer to break the other five rather than write something barbarous. The rules are aids to attention, not a mechanical code, and Orwell admits his own essay contains faults he condemns.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The essay has no medical content. Its advice on plain words over jargon is often applied to medical and scientific writing, but Orwell does not discuss medicine.