George OrwellPolitics and the English LanguageMost 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 civilizationis decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the generalcollapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, likepreferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies thehalf-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for ourown purposes.Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economiccauses: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect canbecome 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 failall the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the Englishlanguage. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness ofour language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process isreversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread byimitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid ofthese habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward politicalregeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern ofprofessional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning ofwhat I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the Englishlanguage as it is now habitually written.These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad — I could havequoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate various of the mental vices fromwhich we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. Inumber them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who onceseemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experienceever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect whichnothing could induce him to tolerate.Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idiomswhich prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with fortolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia)3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic,for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, forthey are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; anotherGeorge Orwell: Politics and the English Language http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit1 of 9 9/1/09 9:56 AMinstitutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that isnatural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itselfis nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definitionof love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in thishall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascistcaptains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide ofthe mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foulincendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destructionof proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinisticfervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.Communist pamphlet5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny andcontentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization andgalvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul.The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion'sroar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream —as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to betraduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of LanghamPlace, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heardat nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly droppedthan the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blamelessbashful mewing maidens!Letter in TribuneEach of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, twoqualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision.The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or heis almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness andsheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of anykind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract andno one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less ofwords chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like thesections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks bymeans of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.DYING METAPHORS. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visualimage, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has