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…
Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural
growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of
a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due
simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect
can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same
effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink
because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely
because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English
language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because out thoughts are foolish, but
the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish
thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies
"something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice
have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with
one another. In the case of a word like democracy,
not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted
from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country
democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of
regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop
using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are
often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them
has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means
something quite different. Statements like Marshal
Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the
freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent
to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less
dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian,
science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
A scrupulous writer, in every
sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What
am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make
it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably
ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is
avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can
shirk it by simply throwing your 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 that the special connection between politics and the
debasement of language becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that
political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, 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 color, seems to demand
a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets,
leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries
do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one
almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one
watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar
phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron
heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to
shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a
live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes
stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns
them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not
altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some
distance toward turning himself 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. If the speech he is making is one that he
is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what
he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this
reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable
to political conformity.
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." 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.
But if thought corrupts language,
language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and
imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language
that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient.
I said earlier that the decadence of
our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they
produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social
conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct
tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of
a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words
and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process
but owing to the conscious action of a minority.
I have not here been considering the
literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing
and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase* and others have
come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used
this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't
know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not
swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present
political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can
probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you
simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You
cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark
its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language--and
with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is
designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an
appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a
moment, but one can at least change one's own habits.
*He was an American
social scientist.