Back in 1946 George Orwell thought the language was dying. He thought that politics was killing it. Surveying public discourse— letters to the editor, print journalism, speeches, brochures and radio broadcasts—he decided that humanity was in retreat, that sentences were losing their soul. Bureaucracy and commerce, politics and fear, he felt, were colonising the English language, strangling it upon the page. So he wrote an essay about what he felt was wrong and what he felt might be done about it. He called his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’.
This was 1946, remember.There’s nothing new about the decline of the language, you see. Keeping it lively and ‘natural’, keeping it humane and democratic, is a struggle that’s never won—and it will surely be lost if you and I don’t keep at it. For each generation seems to invent new ways to subvert the struggle, new ways to emaciate the language for political ends (which they may be quite unconscious of). We have become used to bad language. We’ve been inoculated by bad habits so that most of us are immune to the good old habits we once caught easily. We so often hear bad language—inhumane, dull, lifeless and tuneless—from people we imagine know what they’re doing, that we come to think of bad as good. After a while we stop noticing how ugly and inexact, how pompous and flabby it has all become. By then we’re writing that way ourselves.
For such language is in circulation all about us—in newspapers, in parliament, on the television, in our workplaces. It is the currency in which much of modern life is transacted.We copy it.We take the lead from others—bosses, those who have gone before us, the style police, the newspaper editors, the newsreaders, even the politicians—on how to put things.Way back when I started work at a law firm, for instance, I found myself copying the way the senior partners wrote. It’s the same for the new recruit to the government agency, the fresh academic, the young doctor, the new teacher or
nurse. It was probably the same for you. But not all of them—these partners, these old hands, these professionals—were using language to make things clear.
Language is the chief means by which, as George Bernard Shaw once wrote, the professions conspire against the public. Knowledge is power. Opaque and difficult, imperious language is the best way to hold onto knowledge and power. Language, which is by nature a means of making meaning, of talking among ourselves, becomes in many places a way of doing politics—it becomes the secret code of a society or profession; it becomes the conventional expressions employees and aspirants feel obliged to use, may even be forced to use, to make it in a field or a firm. It becomes a way of not making things clear, a tool for clever obfuscation, a way of hedging bets and keeping one’s nose clean.
We all know when language is being used for politics. It’s hard to understand if you’re uninitiated. It’s dense and vague. It’s abstract and impersonal. It’s formal and cold or it’s falsely breezy. It’s heavy on ideology and light on fact. It’s loud about ends but quiet about means. It’s polysyllabic. It dwells on processes not people. It’s passive. These are all fine ways to say nothing much at all while taking a long time to say it. Writing like that intends not to include but to exclude its readers. It means to deter them, not to invite them in. Such writing is caution and self-interest run amok. Its roots go down to fear and, deeper still, in some cases, to an instinct for keeping hold of one’s secrets.
Good writing needs to transcend politics. It needs to rise above fear. It must, within the limits of professional care and political reality, speak plainly to its readers, aiming to say as much as possible, as economically as possible. Good writing must be everything that fearful, political writing is not—it must be humane, plain, active, informal, concrete, clear and specific. It must have a voice. It must have a life.
Here are the things George Orwell thought writers should do to save their prose from politics.
1 Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech 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. —George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’
T RY T H I S
See if you can mend this paragraph, which is a victim of politics.
Pursuant to the recommendations of our nominated consultants, an all-departmental initiative has been implemented, effective immediately, rationalising human and financial resources in conformity with our strategic mission statement, which I am sure you have all internalised and made operational in your teams. An organisation-wide announcement on this decision will be circulated in the foreseeable future.
Or this:
At ground level, the next issue of Gardens Plus would have been an informative publication for our readers, however it has been decided that Gardens Plus did not have the alignment for our company direction, and hence does not coincide with the bigger picture for our next five-year business plans.