A recent office move stirred up many things, among them dust bunnies, long-lost
paperclip sculptures, and the collection of discarded Euro-coins and British
pennies I’d been keeping in the bottom of a drawer. It also brought to light magnificent strata
of old, long-forgotten photocopies of articles I had pack-rattingly squirreled
away over the years. Since the fall of
the government last Friday and the resulting launch of yet another federal
electoral campaign, and especially in view of the reams of speculative
scribbling and professional political blather that have accompanied the launch
of military operations against the Khadafy regime in Libya, one of the buried
articles I unearthed seemed particularly timely. I refer, of course, to George Orwell’s
magnificent 1946 piece, “Politics and the English Language.”
The thrust of Orwell’s diatribe against
obfuscatory prose is this: the purpose of language is the communication of
ideas, which places it in diametric opposition to political language,
which “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to
give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Orwell identifies a variety of different sins committed routinely
(accidentally as often as deliberately) by the political writer:
·
Deploying metaphors that have been worn-out
through over-use (as examples, he offers a number that are still in widespread
use today, e.g., ‘toe the line’, ‘ride roughshod over’, ‘ stand shoulder to
shoulder with’, ‘play into the hands of’, ‘no axe to grind’, ‘grist to the mill’,
‘Achilles’ heel’, ‘swan song’ and ‘hotbed’).
While a clever or novel metaphor may serve the writer’s (or the speaker’s)
purpose by “evoking a visual image”, the use of such worn-out or dead metaphors
serves only to clutter up an argument with syntactical dead weight;
·
Using what he terms “operators or verbal false
limbs” - polysyllabic phrases in place of more accurate single words. As examples he offers ‘render inoperative’
(break), ‘militate against’ (impede), ‘make contact with’ (touch), ‘play a
leading role in’ (affect), and so forth.
Here, too, the passive voice comes into play, generally in conjunction
with prepositional phrases that seem designed to dissociate the writer from his
prose (“in view of”, “by dint of”, “in the interest of”, “the fact that” - or
my own personal besetting sin, “in that context”). Bad writers also attempt to lend profundity
to their work by means of what Orwell calls the “not un-” formulation. “Possible” becomes “not unlikely”; “favourable”
becomes “not entirely undesirable”, and so on;
·
Pretentious diction, or what my second year
classical strategy prof used to call “using a Latin polysyllable when an
Anglo-Saxon monosyllable will do”. This
is a relatively simple sin to avoid, especially for anyone who speaks both a
Latin and an Anglo-Saxon language, as the differences are readily
apparent. Words of Latin origin, he
argues, are used to “dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific
impartiality to biased judgements”.
Foreign words and expressions, similarly, are used to give an air of “culture
and elegance”. “Bad writers”, Orwell
argues, “and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are
nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than
Saxon ones,” leading to the overuse of unnecessarily complex formulations in
writing, especially in those fields.
Ironically, Orwell also notes that the jargon of Marxism consists of
words transliterated and adapted from Russian, German or French, the languages
of violent revolution in the 19th and 20th Centuries - cannibal, petty
bourgeois, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, etc.; and,
·
Meaningless words. Orwell suggests that this lexical offence sin
takes two forms: first, the use of language in inapplicable circumstances (as,
for example, the attribution of subjective human emotional states to things
like art); and second, the use of words which, through repeated
over-application, have been drained of all meaning. This latter category, Orwell argues, includes
words like “fascism”, which once had a clear meaning but which now, due to
overuse as a political epithet, has been drained of all meaning “except in so
far as it signifies ‘something undesirable’.”
The same has happened to once useful words like “democracy”, “socialism”,
“freedom”, “patriotic”, “realistic” and “justice”; the author now has to define
what he means when he uses them. And
remember, Orwell was writing before there was a country called “The Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea”.
Orwell calls this his “catalogue of swindles
and perversions”, a nice, meaty summation of the literary crimes of which we’ve
all been guilty at one time or another (I for one am a self-confessed repeat
offender), and offers, as an example of the imprecise and ugly prose
characteristic of modern writing styles, this passage:
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, Orwell states, is what one would get if
one were to “translate” a famous paragraph from Ecclesiastes into modern
bureaucratese: “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.” I don’t think there’s any doubt which version
more clearly expresses the author’s intent, or indeed which is more inherently
beautiful. Nor is there any doubt which
one would survive the editor’s pen in a modern bureaucracy, and which one would
be sent back to the author for recrafting.
“Modern writing”, Orwell goes on to argue, “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.” We do this, he suggests,
because it’s easier; “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.” From the point of view of those of us faced
with writing on contentious issues in an environment where our words are
routinely scrutinized for any potential perception of incompatibility with
official policy, there is a further layer of comfort in pre-authorized
verbiage; I’m sure I’m not the only writer who remembers being ordered to
replace newly-researched and carefully-crafted prose with outdated and
ploddingly insipid “approved language” which, because it had already been
signed off by this or that manager, was deemed to have achieved a state of
inviolate and perpetual perfection. Such
practices invert the very purpose of the written word.
There is yet another comfort in complex
linguistic constructions; they isolate the writer from responsibility for his
writing, in perception if not in fact.
One eventually adopts the habit of writing phrases like, “In the author’s
opinion, it is not an unjustifiable assumption that” instead of the far more
concise and accurate, “I think.” The two
phrases mean precisely the same thing, but the former is presumed to sound more
objectively scientific when in reality it is simply more abstruse. There is also the perception – which I think,
or at least hope, is incorrect – that polysyllabic qualifiers are somehow less
condemnatory than concise, qualitatively accurate descriptions of ideas or
events. We saw an example of this a few
weeks ago, when a young politician objected to an immigration pamphlet that
characterized so-called “honour killings” as “barbaric,” arguing that “absolutely
unacceptable” would be a less offensive formulation.(Note A) One was left to wonder why, precisely,
Canadians should be distressed at the thought of having offended those who
murder women and girls for perceived slights to their honour. The linguistic question, however, devolved
upon the failure to recognize that the two terms were neither synonymous nor
mutually exclusive. An act, after all,
can be unacceptable without being barbaric – electronic identity theft comes to
mind – while another, for example the television show “Trailer Park Boys”,
might be considered barbaric (using the dictionary definition of “rough or
uncultured”) without being deemed unacceptable.
The brouhaha that followed was the result of the sloppy use of language,
and its devolution into denunciations and hasty back-pedaling was as
entertaining as it was instructive.
Even when we don’t commit these “swindles and
perversions” ourselves, we are surrounded by no end of obfuscatory lingo. Political speeches are often a trove of what
was once referred to as “bumf”, as are many if not most policy documents. Recent publications in our own Department
provide some truly stunning examples of convoluted prose that can be remarkably
difficult to decrypt. Such examples (and
we’re all aware of at least a few) demonstrate that the quality of language is
often entirely disconnected from the quality of the thought that the language
is intended to convey; it is as easy to present a good idea in bad writing as
it is to present a bad idea in good writing.
What is truly difficult is to express a good idea in good language. Obviously, it helps if you have a good idea
from the outset.
Orwell summarizes his observations by opining
that the “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?”
He adds that the writer will probably ask
himself two further questions:
“1. Could I have put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is unavoidably
ugly?”
In pursuit of good writing, he offers five
rules:
“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;”
…and finally,
“6. Break any of these rules sooner than say
anything outright barbarous.”
If we’re honest with ourselves, I’m sure we can
all come up with examples of how we’ve broken these rules at one time or
another. I can think of a few dozen
examples in the TM I’m currently drafting, and that’s only in the introduction. Hell, I can think of a few dozen examples in
this message!
Of course, there’s really no need to go to all
of this trouble over mere words, is there?
After all, as Orwell notes, we can avoid the agony of crafting accurate,
expressive language by “throwing [the] 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,” he concludes, “that the
special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes
clear.” Orwell goes on to argue that in
the rare circumstances where political writing is not bad, “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 colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative
style.” The prolonged practice of
cleaving to orthodoxy in writing and in speech, he warns, turns the author 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.” This “reduced state of consciousness”,
according to Orwell, “if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to
political conformity.” This is a matter
of grave concern to the well-being of the free world, given how much of modern
politically-derived discourse is dedicated to portraying failures as victories;
presenting as utterly certain proposals or hypotheses that are fundamentally
not amenable to certainty; stating as fact things that are arrant nonsense; and
as Orwell says, mounting a “defence of the indefensible.”
Simplifying our use of English, Orwell
concludes, frees us from “the worst follies of orthodoxy.” If we eschew the formulaic phrases so beloved
of bureaucracies, if we refuse to accept their incestuous, obfuscatory dialects
as the standard for communication (or as is so often the case, numbing
non-communication), then when we say or write something manifestly stupid, it
will be obvious – even to the one who wrote it.
It is, after all, difficult to make “lies sound truthful” if one uses
words like “lie” and “truth” instead of, for example, “somewhat less than
wholly forthright” and “presumably not fundamentally inaccurate”.
Go here for a .pdf copy of Orwell’s piece for
your delectation. You might find, as I
did, that it seems to become more applicable every time you read it.
You might also find this link helpful:
It’s a set of hints for translators facing the
arduous task of translating government documents into other languages. I particularly enjoyed this bit of advice: “Non-verbs
like “impact” and non-adjectives like “impactful” must be changed to words with
real meanings.”
And this one:
“The second part of the translator’s solution for incomprehensible nonsense is to be aware that the purpose of many such expressions is not to say anything of substance at all. Rather, the author stuck the text in just to occupy space without running the risk of adorning it with content. Such fragments make the letter look longer and appear to say more. They are the old bread that you stuff into the turkey to make it look fatter. With a bit of creativity, a good translator can come up with an equally vapid string of words from the target language and culture. Bureaucratese happens all around the world. Since nothing is really being said, giving the appearance of content without saying anything would be a faithful translation.”
Maybe there’s hope for the Queen's English after all.
Incidentally, it turns out that there doesn’t
seem to be a ribbon to protest the abuse of language.(Note B) The closest ones I could find were the
campaigns to “Protest Political Correctness” and in favour of “Less Crap
Online!”, both of which use a brown ribbon.
Unfortunately, the same colour was also chosen by the campaigns for “Free
Beer Online”, “Chombos Chocolate” (whatever that is), and “Carnie Rights
Awareness.” I guess if we want a ribbon,
we’ll have to come up with our own.
Cheers,
//Don//
Notes
