Politics and the English Language

                             George Orwell, 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. They 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.

     1946