By George Orwell
Orwell dissects political language and deception
Themes
English, it is argued, is in a bad way, yet most people assume nothing can be done about it, treating linguistic decline as an inevitable symptom of a decadent civilisation. That assumption is mistaken. Language is not a natural growth beyond human control; it is an instrument shaped for particular purposes, and its decline has identifiable political and economic causes. Crucially, the relationship between corrupt language and corrupt thought runs both ways: sloppy prose makes foolish ideas easier to hold, and foolish ideas in turn produce sloppier prose, in the same way that a man who drinks because he feels himself a failure then fails more completely because he drinks. Because the process feeds itself, it can also be reversed.
English, it is argued, is in a bad way, yet most people assume nothing can be done about it, treating linguistic decline as an inevitable symptom of a decadent civilisation. That assumption is mistaken. Language is not a natural growth beyond human control; it is an instrument shaped for particular…
The essay appeared in 1946, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, a period in which the machinery of state propaganda had reached an unprecedented scale across Europe. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union had each developed sophisticated apparatuses for controlling public…
A direct claim sits at the centre of the argument: in this age, political writing is almost always bad writing. Where an exception appears, it is generally because the writer is some kind of rebel expressing private opinions rather than a party line. Orthodoxy, whatever its colour, seems to demand a…
A set of concrete examples shows how ordinary acts of violence are renamed so that no mental picture forms in the mind of the speaker or the listener. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, their inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire…
A catalogue of four recurring tricks explains how the work of prose construction is habitually dodged. The first is dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a genuine visual image, while a metaphor that has become fully dead, such as iron resolution, has reverted to…
A specific philosophical objection is addressed directly: the writer Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, using this claim as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. The argument runs, in effect, that since one cannot pin down…
The claim that the decadence of language is curable is defended against a specific objection: that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and cannot be influenced by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. This may be true of the general tone or spirit of a language, but it…
Most people admit English is in a bad way but assume nothing conscious can be done about it, as though a decadent civilisation must inevitably drag its language down with it. That assumption rests on a mistaken belief that language grows naturally rather than being an instrument shaped for a…
By George Orwell
Themes
English, it is argued, is in a bad way, yet most people assume nothing can be done about it, treating linguistic decline as an inevitable symptom of a decadent civilisation. That assumption is mistaken. Language is not a natural growth beyond human control; it is an instrument shaped for particular purposes, and its decline has identifiable political and economic causes. Crucially, the relationship between corrupt language and corrupt thought runs both ways: sloppy prose makes foolish ideas easier to hold, and foolish ideas in turn produce sloppier prose, in the same way that a man who drinks because he feels himself a failure then fails more completely because he drinks. Because the process feeds itself, it can also be reversed.