George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

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.

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. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread
by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If
one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a
necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English
is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come
back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here
will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it
is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I could
have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mental
vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly
representative examples. I number 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
once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of
an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder
of that Jesuit sect which nothing 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 idioms
which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with
for tolerate, 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, for they are just what institutional approval keeps
in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter
their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible,
or culturally dangerous. But on the other side ,the social bond itself is
nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall
the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic?
Where is there a place in this hall 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 fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial
horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned
to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned
wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and
rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the
fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny
and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization
and galvanization 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's roar 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 be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of
the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as
"standard English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock,
better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped
than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying
of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness,
two qualities 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 he is almost indifferent as to whether his words
mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked
characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.
As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one
seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and
less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked
together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I list below, with notes and
examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is
habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image,
while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron
resolution ) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used
without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of
worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they
save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the
changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to
shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in
troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed . Many of
these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for
instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer
is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out
of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For
example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line . Another example is the hammer
and the anvil , now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it.
In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a
writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate
verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it
an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate
against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the
effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a
tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc.,etc . The keynote is the elimination of simple
verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill , a verb
becomes a phrase , made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb
such as prove, serve, form, play, render . In addition, the passive voice is wherever
possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of
gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining ). The range of verbs is further cut
down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an
appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and
prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact
that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that ; and the ends
of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be
desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future,
deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion , and so on and
so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective,
categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit,
utilize, eliminate, liquidate , are used to dress up a simple statement and give an aire
of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic,
historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable , are used
to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at
glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm,
throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion .
Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien r&eacutgime, deus ex machina,
mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung , are used to give an air of
culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g. , and etc. , there is
no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English
language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are
nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones,
and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated,
clandestine, subaqueous , and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their
Anglo-Saxon numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal,
petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard , etc.) consists
largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining
a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary,
the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize,
impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English
words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in
slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and
literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely
lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental,
natural, vitality , as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that
they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do
so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is
its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about
Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple
difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon
words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper
way. Many political words are similarly abused. 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 Petain 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.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another
example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an
imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of
the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

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.

Here it is in modern English:

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 is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains
several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full
translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly
closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve
into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had
to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable of using
phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena" -- would ever
tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose
is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The
first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of
everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of
those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six
vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called
vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its
ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first.
Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern
English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and
outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you
or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should
probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes. As I
have tried to show, modern writing at its worst 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. The attraction of this
way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit
-- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If
you use ready-made phrases, 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. When you are composing in a hurry -- when
you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech -- it is
natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we
should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent
will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes,
and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not
only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The
sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash -- as in The
Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it
can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is
naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the
beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One
of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is
the slip -- alien for akin -- making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of
clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and
drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the
everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see
what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply
meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the
article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say,
but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5),
words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have
a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with
another -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A 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?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?

2. 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. The 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. Phrases like
a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a
consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a
packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain
you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting
against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in
Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at
random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an
opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and
political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself,
but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe."
You see, he "feels impelled" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has
something new to say -- and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group
themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by
ready-made phrases ( lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation ) can only be
prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes
a portion of one's brain.

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. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned ,
which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown
metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves
in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of
existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out
foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness
unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English language implies
more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words
and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must
never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of
every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct
grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear,
or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose
style." On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt
to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the
Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that
will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word,
and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender
to them. When yo think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want
to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the
exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more
inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent
it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of
blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as
long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and
sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best
cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are
likely to mak on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed
images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness
generally. 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 us 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.

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, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers
loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel,
hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into
the dustbin, where it belongs.