Politics and the English Language

"Politics and the English Language" (1946) is one of George Orwell's most famous essays. He examines political writing in English, diagnoses its serious faults, and suggests remedies, drawing up a list of rules for writers to follow:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use 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.

Characteristically, Orwell stresses the close association between bad prose and inhumane ideology:

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.

The faults Orwell diagnosed in 1946 are still very common and the essay is as valuable for writers today as it has ever been.

See also:

• Fowler's Modern English Usage
• Logorrhoea
• Pleonasm

External Links

• "Politics and the English Language" (http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html) (1)
• "Politics and the English Language" (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm) (2)
• "Politics and the English Language" (http://eserver.org/langs/politics-english-language.txt) (3)