It is a fascinating exercise to watch one’s own thoughts, what produces them, how they connect and where they head and eventually fade. (This is a form of Solipsism that is guilt free) I’ve come to realize that “thinking” is a particular skill that can be honed and developed to achieve intended results. Today for example, looking out my kitchen window, our Melbourne day is overcast, drab, and slightly brisk with occasional drizzling rain. As my glance turned downward towards the sink, an image of my time in England presented, those long, comfortable grey afternoons, riding an old bicycle through East Grinsted’s narrow winding roads. My eyes turned back towards the window in the direction of the horizon, to think of an old article read many years ago by George Orwell entitled, “Politics and the English Language.”
Orwell was our quintessential Englishman, who drank tea and coffee by the buckets, smoked too many cigarettes and said that any serious writer producing less than one hundred thousand words a year is not doing their job or serious about the art. Intrigued about the article that came to mind, logging on the internet, found it within a few minutes to find its subject matter just as relevant today as when it was first published in April 1946. Orwell has always been a great influence on my generation and is starting to be so for the next generation as well.
In my youth, after reading Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, I considered George Orwell to be that essential beacon of political conscience, that single moral compass, a man with a terrifying awareness of the evils of political subterfuge, a man who left us with an essential warning: be vigilant! But what was he telling us to be vigilant about?
The article begins:
“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.”
Orwell’s arguments are two-fold: language has not “evolved” but has been consciously affected with its political influences and its use in clichés, dying metaphors, meaningless words, pretentious diction and euphemisms to create laziness or apathy in the reader that has all but infiltrated “modern” prose, particularly in “Ad Speak”, political rhetoric, journalism and literature itself, in other words, writing one thing and meaning another; or as my father used to say, “Baffle them with bullshit and the fools won’t know the difference.”
To quote Orwell’s article at length,
“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’.”
Today the same rhetoric and political “euphemisms” are used to hide the true agenda’s of governments, particularly in Australia’s current battle against “Terrorism”. However this rhetoric has evolved from euphemisms to out right lying.
A good example is the Howard Government sending more Australian troops to Afghanistan. This was the first time any mention of Afghanistan was heard in the press of any significance since the atrocity of 9/11. When the Prime Minister was asked why he was sending troops to the country, he said, more or less, terrorism is on the rise, we have intelligence that reveals al Qaeda are seeking refuge in the country and we do not want the terrorists to enter our own borders. This is of course paraphrased but the rhetoric is the same, we’re fighting a war on terror, the “terrorists” are in that country so we’re going there to prevent them from coming to Australia. Well, this is simply not the case. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is an occupied country, and because by its very culture, is made up of numerous tribes lead by various warlords, controlling the insurgents is getting out of hand for the American occupiers, thus our Yankee buddies need a hand to protect the construction of the new oil pipeline to the Caspian Sea, run by a consortium of Shell, BHP and other investors, a collusion of corporations and government with a vested interest in that precious resource, oil.
As Orwell states in his article, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
Our language is fraught with relativism, old clichés, repeated well-worn phrases to the point that we simply believe what we read at face value, because our thoughts have been corrupted to the extent that we will believe anything if it seems not to have an immediate affect on our personal lives.
As a secondary English/History teacher, part of the curriculum is analyzing current issues and the use of persuasive arguments. The student is taught to recognize the use of language in order to express a particular point of view. Time and again we stress the importance of this skill in the application as future citizens and leaders of the future. Sometimes we are successful, sometimes not, however at the very least, the students now know to question what is placed before them, move beyond the surface and seek the truth of the matter. But it seems we as a people do not want the “truth” because it is too much to think about or the truth in most cases does not affect us in present time.
Journalism, at one time, used to be about telling the truth, communicating as clearly as possible, the subject or story being reported.
Orwell had some good advice for the writer to escape falling into clichés, euphemistic language, which makes the reader lazy, and at worst miss-informs, bending our thoughts to an apathetic state. The writer or journalist must read the classics, informing how writing works at its best, and at all costs avoid…” pre-fabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally.”
Orwell’s “elementary” advice is as follows:
“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 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.
"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.”
Fashionable writing seems now to be, in our popular media, to “cut and paste” other’s work, or change words around to manipulate a particular point of view. Journalism is now about entertainment, making the journalist the “story”, a celebrity, pushing the five second sound bite that has the most impact. Advertising, journalism, consumerism and in some cases, academicism, has morphed into a new kind of monster and it seems to me, we have become too lazy to do anything about it.
George Orwell’s last novel, in fact writing the final draft before his early death from tuberculosis at the young age of 48, fictionalized a government that killed language and reinvented its use in tired repetitive catch cries (advertising one liners) to mold the minds of a civilization, and succeeded. He titled this last work, “1984”
It is interesting how a morning gaze out the kitchen window at an overcast sky, connecting to a past time in England, jumping to an article read many years ago, would lead to thoughts about our use of language today and our society in general.
Orwell continues to be that beacon of political light in present time as he was for me so many years ago.
Craig William Middleton
Source:
Orwell, G., “Politics and the English Language”, first published in “Horizon”, GB, London, April 1946; taken from Web Site: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
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