orwell essay politics

“Politics and the English Language.” By George Orwell.

LITERATURE MATTERS

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell poses a thoughtful question: Does language experience “natural growth” or is it shaped “for our own purposes”? In other words, does the English language organically evolve over time or is it purposefully manipulated in order to affect the social order? Anyone familiar with Orwell’s body of work can probably guess at the trajectory of his response. Although one could argue that this seminal essay on 20th-century linguistics was written merely to lament the “general collapse” of language as a reflection of the general collapse of civilization following the Second World War, Orwell’s ultimate purpose is to show that social activists can unduly manipulate language for their own ends by obscuring meaning, corrupting thought, and rendering language a minefield in the political landscape. Why? Orwell says: to effect changes in thought and affections and to shame those who somehow prove impervious to manipulation.

Orwell dramatizes this assertion in Nineteen Eighty-Four . Published three years after “Politics and the English Language,” the iconic dystopic novel imagines a futuristic government that manipulates language so that its citizens conform in thought, word, and deed to a narrow political orthodoxy. Language, in fact, is the primary change agent, assisted by government-engineered fearmongering and savage punishments for language dissidents.

Just as language matters in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four , it matters in our world too. Consider, for example, the basics of “inclusive language.” Back when Orwell was writing, and throughout much of the 20th century, the accepted universal singular pronouns were he , him , and his , a reality codified in every English grammar text published before 1999. These pronouns referred to any individual, whether male or female, as in “Every student should bring his book to class.” The meaning was clear, the convention was understood, and because it was an accepted grammatical convention, no one was denounced as sexist for applying its usage. Some years later, in an effort to be “inclusive,” language handlers in academia and the publishing industry pointed out that the convention itself was sexist and reinforced sexism in society. If they could change the convention, they reasoned, they could change society.

The language handlers first promoted the alternative “inclusive” usage of he or she , him or her , and his or hers — and soon thereafter demanded it. Those who continued using traditional grammatical constructions that included the universal pronouns he , him , and his (especially men) were often branded, on the basis of their grammar alone, as sexists. But mere social stigma later gave way to punitive actions. For example, in 2013, California State University, Chico, revised its definition of sexual harassment and sexual violence to include “continual use of generic masculine terms such as to refer to people of both sexes.” Thus, Chico profs who say, “Every student should bring his book to class” are susceptible to disciplinary actions, up to and including dismissal. As you might imagine, Chico is not alone in this. Rather, this is the norm on most college campuses.

But now, in 2020, it is no longer acceptable to use he or she or him or her . What was once promoted and then demanded by language handlers as inclusive has now been deemed verboten by the same people! Who are these language handlers? In brief, they are the engineers of the English-language style manuals used by academia, the media, and the publishing industry, all easy prey to special-interest lobbyists who demand language changes to promote their sociopolitical agendas. Last year, for example, the American Psychological Association (APA) announced a change to its stylebook, advocating for the singular they because it is “inclusive of all people and helps writers avoid making assumptions about gender.” The APA style guide makes it clear that using his or her is no longer inclusive and no longer acceptable. This could not have happened without the proponents of transgenderism pushing for the manipulation of language. In order for the APA’s statement to make any sense — “they…is inclusive of all people and helps writers avoid making assumptions about gender” — one is forced to accept the premises of transgenderism, including the theory of so-called nonbinary gender. If one is to accept the usage of the singular they , one must also accept the fantasy that an infinite number of genders exists and that language is tied to something called “gender expression” rather than to sex, which is binary (i.e., male and female).

In 2018 the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) released a “Statement on Gender and Language,” promoting the use of the singular they as the only inclusive universal pronoun. In its position statement, the NCTE actually spells out the premises one must accept in order to make sense of the singular they . This is not about language clarity or precision; this is about advancing a sociopolitical agenda that requires everyone — yes, everyone — to accept the following terms:

Gender identity: an individual’s feeling about, relationship with, and understanding of gender as it pertains to their sense of self. An individual’s gender identity may or may not be related to the sex that individual was assigned at birth.

Gender expression: external presentation of one’s gender identity, often through behavior, clothing, haircut, or voice, which may or may not conform to socially defined behaviors and characteristics typically associated with being either masculine or feminine.

Cisgender: of or relating to a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Transgender: of or relating to a person whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. This umbrella term may refer to someone whose gender identity is woman or man, or to someone whose gender identity is nonbinary (see below).

Nonbinary: of or relating to a person who does not identify, or identify solely, as either a woman or a man. More specific nonbinary identifiers include but are not limited to terms such as agender and gender fluid (see below).

Gender fluid: of or relating to individuals whose identity shifts among genders. This term overlaps with terms such as genderqueer and bigender, implying movement among gender identities and/or presentations.

Agender: of or relating to a person who does not identify with any gender, or who identifies as neutral or genderless.

The NCTE, like the APA, the Chicago Manual of Style , and the Associated Press, not only advocates using the singular they , it also prohibits “using he as a universal pronoun” and “using binary alternatives such as he/she , he or she , or (s)he .” And, in case you don’t understand the prohibition, the NCTE provides an example of the forbidden “exclusionary (binary)” language: “Every cast member should know his or her lines by Friday” must be rephrased as “Every cast member should know their lines by Friday.” But the new convention presents an offense against the dignity of traditional grammar usage, as the plural pronoun, their, does not agree with its singular subject, cast member . (Really now, a simpler rewrite would render the sentence both grammatically correct and “inclusive”: All cast members should know their lines by Friday .) And, according to NCTE, in the case of a student named Alex, who declares that his preferred pronouns are they , them , and their, a teacher should say, “Alex needs to learn their lines by Friday.” Yes, seriously, this is the example given by the NCTE. (And whose lines, one may ask? Everyone’s lines? This phrasing is lacking in precision and clarity, and this from the organization that exerts enormous influence over our nation’s high-school English teachers!) To be sure, teachers and students will be forced to utter the ridiculous: Alex needs to learn their lines by Friday . Failing to do so could, in the near future, be construed as gender harassment and be cause for expulsion or sacking.

So, why does it matter what the APA or the Chicago Manual of Style or the NCTE has to say on the matter of nonbinary, gender-inclusive language and the singular they ? Well, the APA sets the writing style and format conventions for academic essays for many college and high-school students, as well as for scholarly articles and books. The Chicago Manual of Style (published by the University of Chicago) sets the editorial standards and conventions that are widely used in the publishing industry. And the NCTE, as mentioned above, sets the tone for high-school English teachers across the nation, those who will teach our children to read, write, and speak.

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell calls this “an invasion of one’s mind” — again, the purposeful manipulation of language in order to corrupt one’s thoughts and affections. Thus, the choice of academia, the media, and the publishing industry to adopt the singular they is not simply about word choice — as silly and illogical as it may be: Alex needs to learn their lines by Friday! — it is about forcing students and others to accept the language of transgenderism and the ideological corollaries behind the vocabulary. It is asking us all to accept something that is less than reality. Pronouns, we are told, are no longer related to the body (male and female) but to the mind, how one “identifies” or “expresses” the social construct of gender. Reality is denied, and the fluid world of one’s nonbinary fancy replaces it.

It is worth noting that last year the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education published a 30-page document, “Male and Female He Created Them,” on this very topic. Quoting Pope Francis, it explains that gender theory “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.” This ideology, Pope Francis explains, promotes “a personal identity and emotional intimacy radically separated from the biological difference between male and female. Consequently, human identity becomes the choice of the individual, one which can also change over time.” Thus, in the case of the Catholic educator or the Catholic student, one must compromise one’s religious principles in order to conform to the industry standards of language.

This attempt to transplant pronouns from the body to the mind, Orwell might say, is an attempt to destroy our ability to communicate. According to this new norm, one can now choose from a multitude of “gender identities” — or simply make up a new one — none of which has any fixed link to a specific set of pronouns. (Some recently emerging gender pronouns include zir, ze, xe, hir, per, ve, ey, hen , and thon . And there are more! Facebook, for example, offers 50 options. Fifty!) In fact, following this reasoning, gender expressionists may, at any time and for any reason, decide to change their preferred personal pronouns but without changing their gender identity; they may also decide to change their gender identity without changing their preferred pronouns — or they may choose to change both.

This is the kind of linguistic pretension that, as Orwell warns, obscures meaning, corrupts thought, and renders language a minefield in the political landscape. Why a minefield? As Orwell illustrated in Nineteen Eighty-Four , language-engineering is an attempt to shame or punish those who disagree with the ascribed linguistic orthodoxy. And, again, to what end? As Chicago-based community activist Saul Alinsky famously wrote in his manifesto Rules for Radicals (1971), “He who controls the language controls the masses.” (Note his use of “sexist language” by way of the universal singular pronoun he. ) Alinsky, an enthusiastic advocate of manipulating language for political purposes, agrees with Orwell: It’s all about thought control; it’s about superimposing a sociopolitical ideology on the masses; it’s about altering our understanding of the world; it’s about customizing the language to effect whimsical social change. It’s ultimately about altering reality so that, as Orwell dramatized in Nineteen Eighty-Four , we come to accept that “war is peace,” that “freedom is slavery,” and that two plus two equals five.

Orwell, as evidenced by “Politics and the English Language,” believes that language should reflect reality. If it doesn’t, what possible limits could be placed on misleading, manipulative language, whether in grade-school textbooks, government documents, or political campaign literature? If language is “always evolving,” as many commentators have reasoned in their recent support of so-called nonbinary, gender-inclusive language (including the singular they ), what is stopping anyone from using this as an excuse to effect any change in any language for any reason at any time?

To submit a Letter to the Editor, click here: https://www.newoxfordreview.org/contact-us/letters-to-the-editor/

Enjoyed reading this?

"Catholicism's Intellectual Prizefighter!"

- Karl Keating

Strengthen the Catholic cause.

SUPPORT NOR TODAY

You May Also Enjoy

Show me a classic and I’ll show you a book few people read unless they’re…

I remember reading Confession when I was in the second year of medical school, and…

The title of my article asks if so-called inclusive language is necessary. A typical reply…

Politics and the English Language

George orwell, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

George Orwell ’s central argument is that the normalization of bad writing leads to political oppression. Orwell starts with the premise that the distortion of “language” reflects a “corruption” of “civilization.” But Orwell objects to the conclusion he believes readers usually draw from this initial premise. Specifically, Orwell claims that most readers—even those who think language and politics are in a bad state—presume that language is merely a mirror of society. That is, language only reflects the state of the world. Orwell claims language doesn’t just reflect the condition society. Language, he argues, also shapes society. He contends that language is both prescriptive and descriptive of civilization’s decline.

Orwell then takes a step back to what explain constitutes bad writing. He begins by listing a series of passages. Reading each passage, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to make out the writer’s point. Orwell uses these passages to identify the elements of bad writing, such as “inflated prose” or a “mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence.” In describing the features of “inflated prose,” Orwell posits that laziness is the primary driver of “inflated style.” That is, instead choosing words and phrases carefully, lazy writers use inflated style to grab whatever smart-sounding words and phrases they have on hand. In the process, bad writers lose their grip on reality, allowing junked-up prose to create a “gap between one's real and one's declared aims.” These writers, he explains, exchange truth for convincing as they pull together words without “really thinking.”

According to Orwell, inflated style circulates through society like a disease, rotting the brains of writers and readers. Once the normalized, Orwell warns, aspiring dictators can more easily engage in linguistic trickery. Manipulative governments can “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable” by using the same “inflated style” of lazy writers. In other words, dictatorships merely capitalize on the linguistic vagueness normalized by lazy writers.

Thus, as means of resisting oppression, Orwell encourages readers to adopt more careful reading and writing practices. To help a writer “change his own habits” as means to resists government manipulation, Orwell outlines eight guidelines for writers geared towards more honesty and concision. He explicitly warns against relying on “readymade phrases” which he describes as like “a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow.” Instead, Orwell encourages readers to exercise more imagination and create more vivid metaphors. Likewise, Orwell recommends concision: using as few syllables and words as possible.

The Best George Orwell Essays Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Orwell (1903-50) is known around the world for his satirical novella Animal Farm and his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , but he was arguably at his best in the essay form. Below, we’ve selected and introduced ten of Orwell’s best essays for the interested newcomer to his non-fiction, but there are many more we could have added. What do you think is George Orwell’s greatest essay?

1. ‘ Why I Write ’.

This 1946 essay is notable for at least two reasons: one, it gives us a neat little autobiography detailing Orwell’s development as a writer; and two, it includes four ‘motives for writing’ which break down as egoism (wanting to seem clever), aesthetic enthusiasm (taking delight in the sounds of words etc.), the historical impulse (wanting to record things for posterity), and the political purpose (wanting to ‘push the world in a certain direction’).

2. ‘ Politics and the English Language ’.

The English language is ‘in a bad way’, Orwell argues in this famous essay from 1946. As its title suggests, Orwell identifies a link between the (degraded) English language of his time and the degraded political situation: Orwell sees modern political discourse as being less a matter of words chosen for their clear meanings than a series of stock phrases slung together.

Orwell concludes with six rules or guidelines for political writers and essayists, which include: never use a long word when a short one will do, or a specialist or foreign term when a simpler English one should suffice.

We have analysed this classic essay here .

3. ‘ Shooting an Elephant ’.

This is an early Orwell essay, from 1936. In it, he recalls his (possibly fictionalised) experiences as a police officer in Burma, when he had to shoot an elephant that had got out of hand. Orwell extrapolates from this one event, seeing it as a microcosm of imperialism, wherein the coloniser loses his humanity and freedom through oppressing others.

We have analysed this essay here .

4. ‘ Decline of the English Murder ’.

In this 1946 essay, Orwell writes about the British fascination with murder, focusing in particular on the period of 1850-1925, which Orwell identifies as the golden age or ‘great period in murder’ in the media and literature. But what has happened to murder in the British newspapers?

Orwell claims that the Second World War has desensitised people to brutal acts of killing, but also that there is less style and art in modern murders. Oscar Wilde would no doubt agree with Orwell’s point of view!

5. ‘ Confessions of a Book Reviewer ’.

This 1946 essay makes book-reviewing as a profession or trade – something that seems so appealing and aspirational to many book-lovers – look like a life of drudgery. Why, Orwell asks, does virtually every book that’s published have to be reviewed? It would be best, he argues, to be more discriminating and devote more column inches to the most deserving of books.

6. ‘ A Hanging ’.

This is another Burmese recollection from Orwell, and a very early work, dating from 1931. Orwell describes a condemned criminal being executed by hanging, using this event as a way in to thinking about capital punishment and how, as Orwell put it elsewhere, a premeditated execution can seem more inhumane than a thousand murders.

We discuss this Orwell essay in more detail here .

7. ‘ The Lion and the Unicorn ’.

Subtitled ‘Socialism and the English Genius’, this is another essay Orwell wrote about Britain in the wake of the outbreak of the Second World War. Published in 1941, this essay takes its title from the heraldic symbols for England (the lion) and Scotland (the unicorn). Orwell argues that some sort of socialist revolution is needed to wrest Britain out of its outmoded ways and an overhaul of the British class system will help Britain to defeat the Nazis.

The long essay contains a section, ‘England Your England’, which is often reprinted as a standalone essay, written as the German bomber planes were whizzing overhead during the Blitz of 1941. This part of the essay is a critique of blind English patriotism during wartime and an attempt to pin down ‘English’ values at a time when England itself was under threat from Nazi invasion.

8. ‘ My Country Right or Left ’.

This 1940 essay shows what a complex and nuanced thinker Orwell was when it came to political labels such as ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’. Although Orwell was on the left, he also held patriotic (although not exactly fervently nationalistic) attitudes towards England which many of his comrades on the left found baffling.

As with ‘England Your England’ above, the wartime context is central to Orwell’s argument, and lends his discussion of the relationship between left-wing politics and patriotic values an urgency and immediacy.

9. ‘ Bookshop Memories ’.

As well as writing on politics and being a writer, Orwell also wrote perceptively about readers and book-buyers – as in this 1936 essay, published the same year as his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying , which combined both bookshops and writers (the novel focuses on Gordon Comstock, an aspiring poet).

In ‘Bookshop Memories’, reflecting on his own time working as an assistant in a bookshop, Orwell divides those who haunt bookshops into various types: the snobs after a first edition, the Oriental students, and so on.

10. ‘ A Nice Cup of Tea ’.

Orwell didn’t just write about literature and politics. He also wrote about things like the perfect pub, and how to make the best cup of tea, for the London Evening Standard in the late 1940s. Here, in this essay from 1946, Orwell offers eleven ‘golden rules’ for making a tasty cuppa, arguing that people disagree vehemently how to make a perfect cup of tea because it is one of the ‘mainstays of civilisation’. Hear, hear.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

Type your email…

3 thoughts on “The Best George Orwell Essays Everyone Should Read”

Thanks, Orwell was a master at combining wisdom and readability. I also like his essay on Edward Lear, although some of his observations are very much of their time: https://edwardleartrail.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/george-orwell-on-edward-lear/

The Everyman edition of Orwell’s essays (1200 pages !) is my desert island book. I like Shooting the Elephant altho Julian Barnes seems to believe this is fictitious. Is this still a live debate ?

Pingback: The Best George Orwell Essays Everyone Should Read

George Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'

George Orwell published his famous essay "Politics and the English Language" in 1946, and we mostly wish he hadn't.

Hosted by Emily Brewster, Ammon Shea, and Peter Sokolowski.

Produced in collaboration with New England Public Media.

Download the episode here .

Emily Brewster: Coming up on Word Matters, things get Orwellian in the narrowest sense of the word. I'm Emily Brewster, and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media. On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Ammon Shea, Peter Sokolowski, and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point. In 1946, George Orwell published his now-famous essay, "Politics and the English Language." Ammon sincerely wishes he hadn't.

Ammon Shea: One of the questions I feel like when you work in dictionaries that you often get from people, is that people always want to know what words are there that you hate, or that one hates or would banish from the language, and what words do you like. I feel like most lexicographers I know are pretty studious in trying to avoid having favorites or certainly about having dis-favorite words. But what I do have a distaste for is writings about words. My least favorite words are just peeves about language. I have to say perhaps foremost among my personal peeves is a piece of writing that is beloved by many. I like to think this is not just my contrarian nature that makes it so despised by me. It's that I think it's a bad piece of writing. I am speaking, of course, of George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." Have you two feelings on this?

Peter Sokolowski: I've only just read it recently. It's one of those things that is referred to so frequently. I'm embarrassed to say, I don't think I ever studied it in school, so I took some of it kind of secondhand, for granted, the way lots of intellectual movements, someone didn't have to study Derrida to know what deconstruction is or to at least know that word is used often by other people. So I often took this to be a reference to the idea that politicians use words in a deliberately manipulative way. So I took it not as a linguistic document at all, but as a more philosophical or a political idea. I usually saw it in the context of names of political parties or movements or laws, something like the Clean Air Act, which I think was criticized for also helping fossil fuels. So people said, "Well, that's Orwellian," because you call it one thing but you really mean something else. So I interpreted it in that very filtered way through the culture.

Emily Brewster: I think I read it about five years after I read ) Animal Farm , so Animal Farm , eighth grade; freshman year of college maybe, "Politics and the English Language." I think I loved them both and believed them both completely. Thought they were just both absolutely brilliant. I didn't actually read this 1946 essay again until last night. I see some problems with Orwell's assertions at this stage, but I can also defend some of them, so.

Ammon Shea: Okay, great. What is this if not an argument. As you pointed out, it was published in 1946. It came out in the journal, "Horizon." When we talk about this particular essay, it is always important to note, and right at the beginning, that Orwell himself is claiming that he's not speaking about language in general. He's talking about political language, the language used by politicians. He specifically says, "I have not here been considering the literary use of language." If we're generous, we can give him that, but I think it's kind of a dodge because I feel like he does kind of broaden his scope. But also I feel like one of the things that has happened with this particular essay is that it is used as kind of a club by many people today in talking about language, and it is almost never used in the context of political language. People just talk out Orwell's views on English, and they don't say, "This is what Orwell had to say about politicians using the language. It's just used as a kind of general thing."

Ammon Shea: To me, one of the main problems is that Orwell seems to have very little idea of how language in general and English in particular actually works. It almost is farcically bad. I remember reading it as a kid and thinking, "Oh, this must be great. He's laying down these rules." We all love rules. We want rules about language. We want language to make sense. It feels very comforting to think that these are concrete steps that I can take to make my language use better, but they're not true. To say that the messenger is flawed is really being over-kind.

Emily Brewster: What does he say that's not true?

Ammon Shea: Well, he has a lot of things about, "Use short words. Never use a long word where a short word will do," which is this longstanding bugaboo with many people. Before Fowler wrote Modern English Usage , his famous book in 1926, he wrote a book with his brother, The King's English . They said you should always prefer the Saxon word to the Romance. E.B. White in The Elements of Style actually wrote, "Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin so use Anglo-Saxon words." Winston Churchill is quoted, whether he said it or not, as saying, "Short words are best, and the old words, when short are best of all." We've long had this feeling that you should go with the short Anglo-Saxon words rather than these fancy, flowery, long Latin words, which to me is just kind of a silly thing to say. I like long words, and when long words are appropriate, they're totally fine. So I think saying, "Never use a long word when a short one will do," is a little bit awkward considering that Orwell uses plenty of long words.

Emily Brewster: I'm looking at the essay. In the second paragraph he uses the word slovenliness . There's some significant letters in there.

Ammon Shea: What he's very good at doing, though, is breaking his own rule in the same sentence that he gives it. In this particular essay, he says, "There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly to be got rid of." This is the section where he says, "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." Fly-blown is, of course, a metaphor. Unless the actual words here have the larva of flies growing out of them, they are not actually a fly-blown metaphor. They're metaphorical metaphors that he's talking about. The essay also has plenty of similes: "like cavalry horses answering the bugle," "a mass of Latin words," "falls upon the facts like soft snow." He talks about like a cuttlefish spreading out ink. He uses these similes and metaphors liberally. So it's kind of odd to me that he exhorts us to not use them. I think perhaps his most egregious mistake is when he says, "Never use the passive voice where you can use the active."

Emily Brewster: Except, Ammon, he doesn't say it like that. This stuck out to me also. He says-

Ammon Shea: It's the very first sentence. "Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way," and then he says, "it is generally assumed," passive voice here, "that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it." He's using the passive voice to tell you not to use the passive voice. So either he doesn't believe his own advice, or he doesn't understand it.

Emily Brewster: Then later in the same essay, he says, "In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active." That itself is in the passive voice. "The passive voice is used," not "writers used the passive voice." Just to refresh people, if you wanted to say "the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active," you would say "writers use the passive voice wherever possible, rather than preferring the active voice." So he is actively doing the things he says writers should not do in his own writing over and over again.

Ammon Shea: He does it in almost all cases. In fact, some people connected with language have found fault with this essay over the years. My favorite was, some while ago, some people went through and actually counted the number of instances in which he used the passive rather than the active voice and found that he was about twice as much as your average college essay at the time. He's using it in 20% of the cases as opposed to 10% of the time when people usually use it in this setting.

Emily Brewster: Wow.

Ammon Shea: He says, "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent." He gives a list of phrases to avoid: deus ex machina , mutatis mutandis , status quo , ancien régime . If you go through any of his writing, he uses most of these in his other writings. He doesn't actually use them in this essay. So this is one that he's not okay with, but he does use them regularly. Overall, my favorite is his sixth rule, which is "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous." I like this so much because it is the one rule that he actually adheres to in his own writing. He breaks all of his own rules so much that it raises the question of why he thought that this should happened in the first place.

Peter Sokolowski: To me, it's the first sentence of the second paragraph that caught my eye because he identifies himself as being a member of a kind of club and invites us to join that club. He says, "Now it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes." Now, first of all, I don't think that's clear at all. Second of all, he's announcing himself as declinist, that "kids today" basically is what he's saying and that "everything must be worse today because I remember when it was better." That is basically the same exact argument we hear all the time. It's the exact same argument that was put against Webster's Third . It's declinism. It's that everything is going to pot and everything is terrible. The weird thing about Orwell is that he makes the same mistake that everyone with a declinist argument makes, which is that he expects language to provide logic. That's just not how writing works. He insists that the decadent culture has produced a collapse of language and that that collapsed language then perpetuates this decline, which is an intellectual race to the bottom, which was exactly the argument against Webster's Third , blaming the dictionary for a perceived drop in quality of standardized test results or something. But the difference is he often seems to be blaming the words rather than the writing.

Ammon Shea: I think he does blame the words rather than writing. He also thinks that if we all just steel ourselves, we can change this. We can stem the flow of bad language by just being conscious of the words that we use. We're going to set a good example. There's a great point in this where he talks about how "the jeers of a few journalists" have done away with a number of phrases that he doesn't like, like "explore every avenue" and "leave no stone unturned." I think he's really overstating the effect that jeers of a few journalists can have on the language use of hundreds of millions of people. If you look at "explore every avenue" and "leave no stone unturned," in the decades following the 1940s, they actually increased dramatically. They're not going away. If they did go away, it wouldn't be because a few journalists like George Orwell jeered at them. It would be because people just stopped using these phrases.

Emily Brewster: You're listening to Word Matters. I'm Emily Brewster. We'll be right back with more on Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.

Peter Sokolowski: Word Matters listeners get 25% off all dictionaries and books at shop.merriam-webster.com by using the promo code "matters" at checkout. That's "matters," M-A-T-T-E-R-S at shop.merriam-webster.com.

Ammon Shea: I'm Ammon Shea. Do you have a question about the origin, history, or meaning of a word? Email us at [email protected].

Peter Sokolowski: I'm Peter Sokolowski. Join me every day for the Word of the Day, a brief look at the history and definition of one word, available at merriam-webster.com or wherever you get your podcasts. For more podcasts from New England Public Media, visit the NEPM podcast hub at nepm.org.

Emily Brewster: The conversation about George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" continues. I do think, though, that the writing that he objects to, and he starts out by giving five examples I think, it is bad writing. He is pointing out that there are real problems. Here is his first example, which I found just mind-numbing. It was by Professor Harold Lasky. The example says, "I am not indeed sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a 17th century Shelley had not become out of an experience ever more bitter in each year more alien to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate." I'm really good at reading opaque text, and this is really, really hard to follow.

Ammon Shea: I agree with you, absolutely. But I would point out that almost nothing in that would be fixed by any of the rules in Orwell's essay. He's using lots of short Saxon words in that piece. He's not using any metaphors or similes that I can see of. He's not using foreign expressions or phrases. I agree. That is a horrible piece of writing. I would not myself enjoy reading writing like that. Anyway, I'm with Orwell when he says that there is some bad writing out there, when he says there's bad political writing. Absolutely. But I feel that what he's kind of saying is let's make it better. Sure, I agree with that. That's where my agreement ends.

Emily Brewster: You agree with none of his advice?

Ammon Shea: I kind of agree with some of it a little bit. If it's possible to cut a word out, always cut it out? No, I don't agree with that. I think that's just a stylistic difference. I think if you look at writing in the 19th century, it's different than writing in the 20th century. It's just stylistically changed. I don't think that one is better for length than the other, or one is better for its brevity than the other.

Emily Brewster: I also have a problem with these kind of absolute statements: never use the passive voice, always use the fewest words possible. I think any kinds of absolutes are problematic. To always avoid any particular thing in writing is unhelpfully narrowing.

Ammon Shea: A great example of this kind of absolutism gone wrong is, we're all familiar with the "never end a sentence with a preposition." Of course, that's a meaningless thing. We end sentences with a preposition all the time. A lot of times the sentence construction demands ending a sentence with a preposition. Terminal prepositions are fine even though we've been hearing for hundreds of years that they're not. Every once in a while, somebody will come up with a variant on that. I used to occasionally see the rule in old uses books, "never end a sentence with a preposition or some other less meaningful word or insignificant word," I think was the way that they used to phrase it.

Ammon Shea: We're starting to make a little more sense if you don't want to end a sentence with a little blip, if you don't want to end your sentence with "of." Now, I don't think of prepositions as less meaningful or less significant personally, but that's just me. But I could see if somebody had the exhortation to end your sentence on an emphatic, meaningful, significant word, it's fine with me. I like that as a general rule of advice. But when you turn that into "Don't end it with a word that's less meaningful or significant," and that somehow becomes "Don't end it with a preposition or don't end it with this kind of thing," that's the kind of absolutism that just doesn't carry water.

Emily Brewster: This makes me think about the motivation for writing an essay such as this and the motivation for sharing an essay like this. This essay was written a long time ago now, in 1946. It is still something that people are talking about and are using in the aid of their own writing, and to try to get other people to be better writers. There is a desire among users of the English language to do that better, to become a better writer, and clearly Orwell thought that he had some important things as a skilled writer. This man was clearly a skilled writer of the English language. He published books. He knew how to use the English language. He was an expert in language use as much as anyone else who writes so many books or spend so much time using language. Any native speaker is actually also an expert. But he had a very specific kind of expertise, and he wanted to share this expertise with people. But he generalized his own expertise in a way that, as you point out, Ammon, was not even an accurate assessment of his own use. Why did he do that? What was he thinking?

Ammon Shea: I don't know why Orwell would write this. The lack of introspection here is stunning to me in that it comes up again and again and again. In the section on "Never use a long word where a short word one will do," he almost immediately says, "A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has got..." This phraseology? That's a pretty damn long word there. I'm sure I could cut phraseology down by at least two or three syllables. Shorter than phraseology? I don't know why he was so lacking in introspection about his own writing.

Ammon Shea: I do think I know why people are still so adamant in sharing this because I think people just want tools. They want to reduce this glorious mess that is English to a series of concrete steps that you can take to make it definably better. Should I use a long word? Never. How about, should I use this simile that I know? Never. These are things that you can say to yourself. When should I use a simile that I'm used to seeing in print? You should never a simile. No, I'm going to never use a simile, and my writing will therefore be better. But I don't think that language responds well to this kind of absolutism. It gives us a sense of comfort. It must be better because I'm following these rules that were set down in the journal, Horizon, and that our results will be better. I don't think that's the way that it works.

Peter Sokolowski: He's completely ignorant on matters of the scientific study of language, on what we would call linguistics. He's not a linguist, but he's a good writer. That is the problem here, which is that so many people and especially declinists or language change deniers, people who say "kids today," they often want language to be like math. They want it to be logical, and they want to find a formula. I think what this all points to for me is that good prose style is much more art than science, and it requires, dare I say it, humanities exposure, the kind of general exposure to good writing and lots of it that you can only get if you read a lot. That's really the club to join. Join the readers who then can identify, "Oh, yes. That is a nicely turned phrase."

Peter Sokolowski: The fact is Orwell writes this in 1946, and he has nothing but contempt and scorn for all political discourse. Yet, he's within a couple of years of Churchill saying, "We shall meet them on the beaches. We shall meet them on the landing grounds." He's within a couple of years of FDR saying, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Some of the greatest political utterances in the history of the language were made just a couple of years before this essay was written. So he's kind of deliberately putting his thumb on the scale, which is what a lot of essayists do. He's got the right reflex but the wrong tools. He's not equipped to help others write. All he really is doing is listing his peeves.

Emily Brewster: But Peter, of those examples that you cite, Churchill and FDR, I think Orwell would have given the thumbs up to. He would've said, "Yes, these are good examples."

Ammon Shea: But those are following his rules. There is something to be said for that. Those are well written, and I think they're very effective particularly as political discourse. Again, if we're going to be kind to Orwell we can say that, yes, a lot of what he's saying will apply to the current political language that was being used.

Ammon Shea: Something that Peter said a few minutes ago, and I'm going to disagree with that, which is that you said, "People want language to be like math." I think in some ways they do, but actually I think people want language to be like religion more than they want it to be like math. There's a comfort that people get from certain religious structures that some other people try to get from certain linguistic structures, that there are things which are done by the righteous, and there are things that are done by the unrighteous in a way. And that a lack of adherence to this set of structure betokens a lack of moral fiber in a way because we make these value judgments of people based on their language use which have nothing to do with anything a lot of the time. It's not a one-to-one comparison between religion and language, but I am often reminded of religious fervor when I hear the way that certain people talk about how language use should be.

Peter Sokolowski: A big part of the conversations that we've all had with members of the public or strangers, people who correspond with a dictionary in one way or another, is some kind of membership of a club. "You care about language in the way that I do." There is absolutely a huge moral component that is imposed upon that. We always are judging others by their use of language. We are always judged by our use of language, by the way we spell, by the way we pronounce words. That's just a simple human fact. It's easier for us as professionals to separate that from culture.

Peter Sokolowski: So what you just said, Ammon, which is so true, which is that these things have nothing to do with drawing moral conclusions, whether you end a sentence with a preposition or whether you don't put an apostrophe in "you're." Yet, it becomes a shorthand for the kind of person that I want to know or the kind of person that I grew up with or the kind of person my parents raised me to be. That's very extra-linguistic, isn't it? That's why I think, Ammon, your analysis is brilliant. That takes you into something like religion, like culture, that goes way beyond what a language can do, but we extrapolate so much from it.

Emily Brewster: Language does indeed do that. It is one of the things that a language does, the different ways that language are used. It generates these in-groups and out-groups. But I think it is really important to reflect back on that and to recognize that good grammar does not mean ethical. You can have by-the-book grammar and never conjugate a verb incorrectly and be a horribly unethical person. That is wholly possible.

Peter Sokolowski: Exactly.

Ammon Shea: If we go back to Orwell, I don't want to be too harsh in my assessment of him, though I don't think he had any business writing about language, but this was just an essay that he wrote. I think the real problem here was that it's been then kept alive by other people who are trying to turn it into something that it's not and that it's not equipped to handle. I think insofar as these kinds of exhortatory writing advice pieces go, I'm willing to go as far as "you should write better; you should consider your language; you should write carefully." I think these are all fine things to say. I start to shut down when I see the linguistic absolutism: "never do this," and "never do that." There are very few cases that I can think of in which you should never do something. I'm not going to say you should never, of course, because that would contraindicate myself. But there are very few cases in which I would feel comfortable saying, "Never do this."

Peter Sokolowski: If you remove politics from this essay, I find it hard to distinguish it from Strunk & White, another famous book that also offers advice that is poorly constructed from a linguistics point of view.

Ammon Shea: I think there are a lot of problems with Strunk & White, but I feel that Strunk & White is actually more forgiving than this. I mean, Strunk & White, I don't think they say things like, "Never start a sentence with 'and' and 'but.'" They actually have some flexibility, not much. I think Strunk & White is a horrible, dated document that should be burned in a trash heap. It's not as bad as this.

Peter Sokolowski: I can't help but quote our friend Geoffrey Pullum, the great grammarian who refers to Strunk & White as "a toxic little compendium of nonsense."

Ammon Shea: Yes.

Emily Brewster: Yes, and "grammarian," as in a linguist.

Peter Sokolowski: A linguist and professor of grammar and author of maybe the definitive grammar of the English language today but also someone who has a great flare.

Emily Brewster: Yeah, that's a fantastic quote. The reason that this essay, of course, has been promulgated and is the reason we are talking about it today is because people are still talking about it, because people still want guidance on how to write better. I am wondering, Ammon, as a writer, how do you think people should learn to write better? Putting aside, for a minute, the writers who think that they have all this advice to offer to the rest of us, how should people who want to improve their writing do so?

Ammon Shea: Read more. Read writers you like is the way to go about it. For me, one of the main issues with a lot of the standard writing books is even writers that we enjoy, like many people enjoy Stephen King, I think he has some fine characteristics in his writing. When he starts giving writing advice, he had this great passage where he talked about all the times you shouldn't use adverbs. People went through and found dozens and dozens of adverbs in the page that he was talking about, "you shouldn't use adverbs in your writing." It quickly became apparent that he didn't really know what an adverb was in a lot of cases. That kind of writing advice, I think, doesn't work.

Ammon Shea: Now, I know a number of other writers who have read Stephen King and talked about the way that they've been influenced by his writing, the ways that he develops plot, maybe his character development, any number of things, which he does phenomenally well. I think that's a great way to learn writing. If for nothing else, one of my biggest peeves about this kind of language writing is that almost inevitably it is focusing on the negative. Why when we hear people say, "Oh, I care about language," why is that so often synonymous with saying, "I like to talk trash about the way that other people use language"? Why, when people say, "I care about language and let me share with you some of the things that I think are really beautiful about it. These are some fine examples of well-turned phrases," why is that so infrequently something that we come across?

Ammon Shea: I think if you care about language, if you love language, you should be embracing the kind of delectability of it, the fine use of language. Look at some of the nice ones. There's so much beautiful language around us that I think we're really doing ourselves a disservice, not to mention the people who have to listen to us, but doing them a much greater disservice if all we do is focus on the negative.

Emily Brewster: That's totally true. But it's easier to point out the ugliness than it is to quote the sublime. There is gorgeous writing out there that can just be staggering. I think the other thing is that if you want to improve your writing, it's really nice to think that there are some distinct steps that you can take that will then result in you being an improved writer. That's really comforting and much simpler than read, read, read, read, read, read good writers, read over and over and over again, and identify things you really like, and then read something aloud that you have written and see how it feels.

Emily Brewster: Writing well is not about following distinct steps. It's about getting a feel for it. It is an art form. But the really tricky thing about it is that we all use language. Painters have paint as their territory. That's their medium. I don't even have to dabble in it. I mean I paint my bathroom, whatever. I don't have mastery, and I don't think that I have mastery of paint at all, and I don't need to. But as a speaker of English and as somebody who has to write an occasional email or whatever, even if I weren't a lexicographer, all of us, as native speakers, we use this tool, and then some people use it professionally. It's a very tricky territory. Some people use it artistically, and some people use it solely for jargon, and some people use it for political purposes. We need the language to do so much, and it does do all these different things.

Emily Brewster: To get really good at writing creatively or writing in a way that moves people or that convinces people, it feels like it should be simple because you know the tools, you know the words, you know the prepositions, you know the basic sentence structure. But to actually do it in a way that is compelling takes a lot of practice.

Emily Brewster: Let us know what you think about Word Matters. Review us wherever you get your podcasts or email us at [email protected]. You can also visit us at nepm.org. For the Word of the Day and all your general and dictionary needs, visit merriam-webster.com. Our theme music is by Tobias Voigt, artwork by Annie Jacobson. Word Matters is produced by John Voci. For Ammon Shea and Peter Sokolowski, I'm Emily Brewster. Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.

Word of the Day

See Definitions and Examples »

Get Word of the Day daily email!

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!

Games & Quizzes

Play Quordle: Guess all four words in a limited number of tries. Each of your guesses must be a real 5-letter word.

Retrospect Journal.

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY'S HISTORY, CLASSICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY MAGAZINE

On Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’

First published in 1946, George Orwell’s commentary on political language remains culturally salient. Preoccupied with the ‘decay’ of his mother tongue and the political implications inherent to such a decline, Orwell defines the source of such linguistic decadence as a ‘reduced state of consciousness’ in which the metaphor is dead, and pretentiousness prevails. While Orwell’s list of linguistic ‘swindles and perversions’ – including ‘dying metaphors,’ ‘meaningless words’ and ‘pretentious diction’ – continues to characterise much of contemporary political discourse, it should be questioned by a subtle alteration in the analysis of language used within the public and political spheres.

Contemplating the death of the metaphor requires the acknowledgement of language and semantic fields as markers of complex value systems. Orwell recognises that much political writing exists as iterations of significant works based on an ‘orthodox’ and ‘imitative style’, with such regurgitation intent on blurring perceptions that ‘a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.’ Such a claim is vital and acknowledges the political potency of euphemism, yet it fails to recognise the centrality of such repetition in building linguistic fortifications for the defence of political ideologies. The metaphor may be dead; yet it retains a spectral quality in the way that its invocation can come to instantly represent, and often reinforce, a certain political view. Thus, providing symbolism for unique political identities in a political sphere which much like Orwell’s is ‘a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia’. As Simone Weil suggests ‘when empty words are given capital letters’ they have the ability to become ‘all swollen with blood and tears’.

Take Orwell’s examples of fascist, democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic and justice. All have multiple disparate and irreconcilable meanings; however, in the present they do not observe the futility as political terms that the natural trajectory of Orwell’s argument dictates. The above concepts can be placed into categories which are symbolic of broad political ideologies, acting as dog whistles in the signification of certain values. Developing in the later twentieth century and being ideologically streamlined throughout the twenty-first century, universal values such as that of ‘freedom’ and ‘patriotism’ have now become innately linked to conservative ideologies in the western psyche and are often invoked in arguments for issues which are diametrically opposed to the purest meaning of the term. Churchwell explores this tendency in depth in her work on the conceptual histories of the terms ‘America First’ and ‘The American Dream’ from c.1900-1945. Exploring the relationship between language and the formation of elaborate coding systems in which certain political terminology becomes so laden with value that ‘slogans’ are not simply just ‘mere words’ when they can erect ‘political realities.’

With sporadic reference to the actual implications of such language use for European politics in the age of totalitarianism, Orwell’s essay reads as a lamentation on linguistic decline. While offering reflections on how advantageous obscuring meaning and definition can be for political actors – recognising that ‘present political chaos is connected with the decay of language’ – the majority of Orwell’s focus lies not on the saliency of language in the political sphere, including forming opinion and outcome, but instead on how politics dictates shift in language use. While this in itself is not an inconsequential phenomenon, the richness of the context in which Orwell was writing offers abundant cases to explore the implications of what the death and manipulation of language may mean for political reality, not just observing the potential for political decline but actively interrogating the associated role of language within it. The observation that ‘thought corrupts language’ has a significant oversight if the perspective that thought is based on language is not recognised as fundamental, rather than simply another possibility of the relationship between the two factors.

The irony of Orwell’s desire to use the ‘fewest and shortest words’ and offer rules for language usage, is not lost on those who are familiar with his oeuvre, even if such claims are made with the regeneration of the English language in mind. Individuals with an affliction for literature will recognise Orwell’s desire for a conscious evocation of language, a recognition of the power of storytelling for human sustenance and the natural significance this places on language. While simplicity and consciousness are the remedies prescribed by Orwell, present obsessions with linguistic consciousness are not symbolic of Orwell’s desire for a reinvigorated English language, instead they are symbolic of the deception Orwell desired to avoid. Language is chosen carefully to ensure the confirmation of certain political stories and predetermined binaries, with high degrees of social risk for those who stray from linguistic conformity.

Thus, we should be conscious of our metaphors not for what they confirm but for what they question. Orwell’s desire for linguistic simplicity must be denied in a context in which all undemanding political terms come dripping with value.

Written by Georgia Smith

Bibliography

Churchwell, Sarah. 2019. Behold America. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Orwell, George. 2000. George Orwell: Essays. London: Penguin Classics.

Available at https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

Weil, Simone. 2005. Selected. Simone Weil: An Anthology: Penguin Classics.

The Orwell Foundation

The Orwell Prizes
The Orwell Youth Prize

Politics vs. Literature: An examination of Gulliver’s Travels

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate . The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere.

In Gulliver’s Travels humanity is attacked, or criticized, from at least three different angles, and the implied character of Gulliver himself necessarily changes somewhat in the process. In Part I he is the typical eighteenth-century voyager, bold, practical and unromantic, his homely outlook skilfully impressed on the reader by the biographical details at the beginning, by his age (he is a man of forty, with two children, when his adventures start), and by the inventory of the things in his pockets, especially his spectacles, which make several appearances. In Part II he has in general the same character, but at moments when the story demands it he has a tendency to develop into an imbecile who is capable of boasting of ‘our noble Country, the Mistress of Arts and Arms, the Scourge of France’, etc., etc., and at the same time of betraying every available scandalous fact about the country which he professes to love. In Part III he is much as he was in Part I, though, as he is consorting chiefly with courtiers and men of learning, one has the impression that he has risen in the social scale. In Part IV he conceives a horror of the human race which is not apparent, or only intermittently apparent, in the earlier books, and changes into a sort of unreligious anchorite whose one desire is to live in some desolate spot where he can devote himself to meditating on the goodness of the Houyhnhnms . However, these inconsistencies are forced upon Swift by the fact that Gulliver is there chiefly to provide a contrast. It is necessary, for instance, that he should appear sensible in Part I and at least intermittently silly in Part II, because in both books the essential manoeuvre is the same, i.e. to make the human being look ridiculous by imagining him as a creature six inches high. Whenever Gulliver is not acting as a stooge there is a sort of continuity in his character, which comes out especially in his resourcefulness and his observation of physical detail. He is much the same kind of person, with the same prose style, when he bears off the warships of Blefuscu , when he rips open the belly of the monstrous rat, and when he sails away upon the ocean in his frail coracle made from the skins of Yahoos . Moreover, it is difficult not to feel that in his shrewder moments Gulliver is simply Swift himself, and there is at least one incident in which Swift seems to be venting his private grievance against contemporary society. It will be remembered that when the Emperor of Lilliput’s palace catches fire, Gulliver puts it out by urinating on it. Instead of being congratulated on his presence of mind, he finds that he has committed a capital offence by making water in the precincts of the palace, and

I was privately assured, that the Empress, conceiving the greatest Abhorrence of what I had done, removed to the most distant Side of the Court, firmly resolved that those buildings should never be repaired for her Use; and, in the Presence of her chief Confidents, could not forbear vowing Revenge.

According to Professor G. M. Trevelyan ( England Under Queen Anne ), part of the reason for Swift’s failure to get preferment was that the Queen was scandalized by A Tale of a Tub – a pamphlet in which Swift probably felt that he had done a great service to the English Crown, since it scarifies the Dissenters and still more the Catholics while leaving the Established Church alone. In any case no one would deny that Gulliver’s Travels is a rancorous as well as a pessimistic book, and that especially in Parts I and III it often descends into political partisanship of a narrow kind. Pettiness and magnanimity, republicanism and authoritarianism, love of reason and lack of curiosity, are all mixed up in it. The hatred of the human body with which Swift is especially associated is only dominant in Part IV, but somehow this new preoccupation does not come as a surprise. One feels that all these adventures, and all these changes of mood, could have happened to the same person, and the inter-connection between Swift’s political loyalties and his ultimate despair is one of the most interesting features of the book.

Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment. Part I of Gulliver’s Travels , ostensibly a satire on human greatness, can be seen, if one looks a little deeper, to be simply an attack on England, on the dominant Whig Party, and on the war with France, which – however bad the motives of the Allies may have been – did save Europe from being tyrannized over by a single reactionary power. Swift was not a Jacobite nor strictly speaking a Tory , and his declared aim in the war was merely a moderate peace treaty and not the outright defeat of England. Nevertheless there is a tinge of quislingism in his attitude, which comes out in the ending of Part I and slightly interferes with the allegory. When Gulliver flees from Lilliput (England) to Blefuscu (France) the assumption that a human being six inches high is inherently contemptible seems to be dropped. Whereas the people of Lilliput have behaved towards Gulliver with the utmost treachery and meanness, those of Blefuscu behave generously and straightforwardly, and indeed this section of the book ends on a different note from the all-round disillusionment of the earlier chapters. Evidently Swift’s animus is, in the first place, against England . It is ‘your Natives’ (i.e. Gulliver’s fellow-countrymen) whom the King of Brobdingnag considers to be ‘the most pernicious Race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth’, and the long passage at the end, denouncing colonisation and foreign conquest, is plainly aimed at England, although the contrary is elaborately stated. The Dutch, England’s allies and target of one of Swift’s most famous pamphlets, are also more or less wantonly attacked in Part III. There is even what sounds like a personal note in the passage in which Gulliver records his satisfaction that the various countries he has discovered cannot be made colonies of the British Crown:

The Houyhnhnms , indeed, appear not to be so well prepared for War, a Science to which they are perfect Strangers, and especially against missive Weapons. However, supposing myself to be a Minister of State, I could never give my advice for invading them. … Imagine twenty thousand of them breaking into the midst of an European army, confounding the Ranks, overturning the Carriages, battering the Warriors’ Faces into Mummy, by terrible Yerks from their hinder hoofs…

Considering that Swift does not waste words, that phrase, ‘battering the warriors’ faces into mummy’, probably indicates a secret wish to see the invincible armies of the Duke of Marlborough treated in a like manner. There are similar touches elsewhere. Even the country mentioned in Part III, where ‘the Bulk of the People consist, in a Manner, wholly of Discoverers, Witnesses, Informers, Accusers, Prosecutors, Evidences, Swearers, together with their several subservient and subaltern Instruments, all under the Colours, the Conduct, and Pay of Ministers of State’, is called Langdon, which is within one letter of being an anagram of England. (As the early editions of the book contain misprints, it may perhaps have been intended as a complete anagram.) Swift’s physical repulsion from humanity is certainly real enough, but one has the feeling that his debunking of human grandeur, his diatribes against lords, politicians, court favourites, etc., has mainly a local application and springs from the fact that he belonged to the unsuccessful party. He denounces injustice and oppression, but he gives no evidence of liking democracy. In spite of his enormously greater powers, his implied position is very similar to that of the innumerable silly-clever Conservatives of our own day – people like Sir Alan Herbert , Professor G. M. Young , Lord Elton , the Tory Reform Committee or the long line of Catholic apologists from W. H. Mallock onwards: people who specialise in cracking neat jokes at the expense of whatever is ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’, and whose opinions are often all the more extreme because they know that they cannot influence the actual drift of events. After all, such a pamphlet as An Argument to prove that the Abolishing of Christianity etc. is very like ‘Timothy Shy’ having a bit of clean fun with the Brains Trust , or Father Ronald Knox exposing the errors of Bertrand Russell . And the ease with which Swift has been forgiven – and forgiven, sometimes, by devout believers – for the blasphemies of A Tale of a Tub demonstrates clearly enough the feebleness of religious sentiments as compared with political ones.

However, the reactionary cast of Swift’s mind does not show itself chiefly in his political affiliations. The important thing is his attitude towards science, and, more broadly, towards intellectual curiosity. The famous Academy of Lagado, described in Part III of Gulliver’s Travels , is no doubt a justified satire on most of the so-called scientists of Swift’s own day. Significantly, the people at work in it are described as ‘Projectors’, that is, people not engaged in disinterested research but merely on the look-out for gadgets which will save labour and bring in money. But there is no sign – indeed, all through the book there are many signs to the contrary – that ‘pure’ science would have struck Swift as a worth-while activity. The more serious kind of scientist has already had a kick in the pants in Part II, when the ‘Scholars’ patronised by the King of Brobdingnag try to account for Gulliver’s small stature:

After much Debate, they concluded unanimously that I was only Relplum Scalcath , which is interpreted literally, Lusus Naturae ; a Determination exactly agreeable to the modern philosophy of Europe , whose Professors, disdaining the old Evasion of Occult Causes , whereby the followers of Aristotle endeavoured in vain to disguise their Ignorance, have invented this wonderful Solution of all Difficulties, to the unspeakable Advancement of human Knowledge.

If this stood by itself one might assume that Swift is merely the enemy of sham science. In a number of places, however, he goes out of his way to proclaim the uselessness of all learning or speculation not directed towards some practical end:

The learning of (the Brobdingnagians) is very defective, consisting only in Morality, History, Poetry, and Mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But, the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in Life, to the Improvement of Agriculture, and all mechanical Arts so that among us it would be little esteemed. And as to Ideas, Entities, Abstractions, and Transcendentals, I could never drive the least Conception into their Heads.

The Houyhnhnms, Swift’s ideal beings, are backward even in a mechanical sense. They are unacquainted with metals, have never heard of boats, do not, properly speaking, practise agriculture (we are told that the oats which they live upon ‘grow naturally’), and appear not to have invented wheels. [1] They have no alphabet, and evidently have not much curiosity about the physical world. They do not believe that any inhabited country exists beside their own, and though they understand the motions of the sun and moon, and the nature of eclipses, ‘this is the utmost Progress of their Astronomy ’. By contrast, the philosophers of the flying island of Laputa are so continuously absorbed in mathematical speculations that before speaking to them one has to attract their attention by flapping them on the ear with a bladder. They have catalogued ten thousand fixed stars, have settled the periods of ninety-three comets, and have discovered, in advance of the astronomers of Europe, that Mars has two moons – all of which information Swift evidently regards as ridiculous, useless and uninteresting. As one might expect, he believes that the scientist’s place, if he has a place, is in the laboratory, and that scientific knowledge has no bearing on political matters:

What I… thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong Disposition I observed in them towards News and Politics, perpetually enquiring into Public Affairs, giving their judgments in Matters of State, and passionately disputing every inch of a Party Opinion. I have, indeed, observed the same Disposition among most of the Mathematicians I have known in Europe , though I could never discover the least Analogy between the two Sciences; unless those People suppose, that, because the smallest Circle hath as many Degrees as the largest, therefore the Regulation and Management of the World require no more Abilities, than the Handling and Turning of a Globe.

Is there not something familiar in that phrase ‘I could never discover the least analogy between the two sciences’? It has precisely the note of the popular Catholic apologists who profess to be astonished when a scientist utters an opinion on such questions as the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. The scientist, we are told, is an expert only in one restricted field: why should his opinions be of value in any other? The implication is that theology is just as much an exact science as, for instance, chemistry, and that the priest is also an expert whose conclusions on certain subjects must be accepted. Swift in effect makes the same claim for the politician, but he goes one better in that he will not allow the scientist – either the ‘pure’ scientist or the ad-hoc investigator – to be a useful person in his own line. Even if he had not written Part III of Gulliver’s Travels , one could infer from the rest of the book that, like Tolstoy and like Blake , he hates the very idea of studying the processes of Nature. The ‘Reason’ which he so admires in the Houyhnhnms does not primarily mean the power of drawing logical inferences from observed facts. Although he never defines it, it appears in most contexts to mean either common sense – i.e. acceptance of the obvious and contempt for quibbles and abstractions – or absence of passion and superstition. In general he assumes that we know all that we need to know already, and merely use our knowledge incorrectly. Medicine, for instance, is a useless science, because if we lived in a more natural way, there would be no diseases. Swift, however, is not a simple-lifer or an admirer of the Noble Savage . He is in favour of civilisation and the arts of civilisation. Not only does he see the value of good manners, good conversation, and even learning of a literary and historical kind, he also sees that agriculture, navigation and architecture need to be studied and could with advantage be improved. But his implied aim is a static, incurious civilisation – the world of his own day, a little cleaner, a little saner, with no radical change and no poking into the unknowable. More than one would expect in anyone so free from accepted fallacies, he reveres the past, especially classical antiquity, and believes that modern man has degenerated sharply during the past hundred years. [2] In the island of sorcerers, where the spirits of the dead can be called up at will:

I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large Chamber, and a modern Representative in Counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an Assembly of Heroes and Demy-Gods, the other a Knot of Pedlars, Pick-pockets, Highwaymen, and Bullies.

Although Swift uses this section of Part III to attack the truthfulness of recorded history, his critical spirit deserts him as soon as he is dealing with Greeks and Romans. He remarks, of course, upon the corruption of imperial Rome, but he has an almost unreasoning admiration for some of the leading figures of the ancient world:

I was struck with profound Veneration at the sight of Brutus , and could easily discover the most consummate Virtue, the greatest Intrepidity and Firmness of Mind, the truest Love of his Country, and general Benevolence for mankind, in every Lineament of his Countenance. … I had the Honour to have much Conversation with Brutus , and was told, that his Ancestors Junius, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the younger, Sir Thomas More , and himself, were perpetually together: a Sextumvirate , to which all the Ages of the World cannot add a seventh.

It will be noticed that of these six people, only one is a Christian. This is an important point. If one adds together Swift’s pessimism, his reverence for the past, his incuriosity and his horror of the human body, one arrives at an attitude common among religious reactionaries – that is, people who defend an unjust order of Society by claiming that this world cannot be substantially improved and only the ‘next world’ matters. However, Swift shows no sign of having any religious beliefs, at least in any ordinary sense of the words. He does not appear to believe seriously in life after death, and his idea of goodness is bound up with republicanism, love of liberty, courage, ‘benevolence’ (meaning in effect public spirit), ‘reason’ and other pagan qualities. This reminds one that there is another strain in Swift, not quite congruous with his disbelief in progress and his general hatred of humanity.

To begin with, he has moments when he is ‘constructive’ and even ‘advanced’. To be occasionally inconsistent is almost a mark of vitality in Utopia books, and Swift sometimes inserts a word of praise into a passage that ought to be purely satirical. Thus, his ideas about the education of the young are fathered on to the Lilliputians, who have much the same views on this subject as the Houyhnhnms. The Lilliputians also have various social and legal institutions (for instance, there are old age pensions, and people are rewarded for keeping the law as well as punished for breaking it) which Swift would have liked to see prevailing in his own country. In the middle of this passage Swift remembers his satirical intention and adds, ‘In relating these and the following Laws, I would only be understood to mean the original Institutions, and not the most scandalous Corruptions into which these people are fallen by the degenerate Nature of Man’: but as Lilliput is supposed to represent England, and the laws he is speaking of have never had their parallel in England, it is clear that the impulse to make constructive suggestions has been too much for him. But Swift’s greatest contribution to political thought, in the narrower sense of the words, is his attack, especially in Part III, on what would now be called totalitarianism. He has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted ‘police State,’ with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials, all really designed to neutralise popular discontent by changing it into war hysteria. And one must remember that Swift is here inferring the whole from a quite small part, for the feeble governments of his own day did not give him illustrations ready-made. For example, there is the professor at the School of Political Projectors who ‘shewed me a large Paper of Instructions for discovering Plots and Conspiracies’, and who claimed that one can find people’s secret thoughts by examining their excrement:

Because Men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at Stool, which he found by frequent Experiment: for in such Conjunctures, when he used meerly as a Trial to consider what was the best Way of murdering the King, his Ordure would have a Tincture of Green; but quite different when he thought only of raising an Insurrection, or burning the Metropolis.

The professor and his theory are said to have been suggested to Swift by the – from our point of view – not particularly astonishing or disgusting fact that in a recent State trial some letters found in somebody’s privy had been put in evidence. Later in the same chapter we seem to be positively in the middle of the Russian purges:

In the Kingdom of Tribnia, by the Natives called Langdon… the Bulk of the People consist, in a Manner, wholly of Discoverers, Witnesses, Informers, Accusers, Prosecutors, Evidences, Swearers. … It is first agreed, and settled among them, what suspected Persons shall be accused of a Plot: Then, effectual Care is taken to secure all their Letters and Papers, and put the Owners in Chains. These papers are delivered to a Sett of Artists, very dexterous in finding out the mysterious Meanings of Words, Syllables, and Letters. … Where this Method fails, they have two others more effectual, which the Learned among them call Acrostics and Anagrams. First , they can decypher all initial Letters into political Meanings: Thus, N shall signify a Plot, B a Regiment of Horse, L a Fleet at Sea: Or, Secondly , by transposing the Letters of the Alphabet in any suspected Paper, they can lay open the deepest Designs of a discontented Party. So, for Example if I should say in a Letter to a Friend, Our Brother Tom has just got the Piles , a skilful Decypherer would discover that the same Letters, which compose that Sentence, may be analysed in the following Words: Resist – a Plot is brought Home – The Tour . [3] And this is the anagrammatic Method.

Other professors at the same school invent simplified languages, write books by machinery, educate their pupils by inscribing the lesson on a wafer and causing them to swallow it, or propose to abolish individuality altogether by cutting off part of the brain of one man and grafting it on to the head of another. There is something queerly familiar in the atmosphere of these chapters, because, mixed up with much fooling, there is a perception that one of the aims of totalitarianism is not merely to make sure that people will think the right thoughts, but actually to make them less conscious . Then, again, Swift’s account of the Leader who is usually to be found ruling over a tribe of Yahoos, and of the ‘favourite’ who acts first as a dirty-worker and later as a scapegoat, fits remarkably well into the pattern of our own times. But are we to infer from all this that Swift was first and foremost an enemy of tyranny and a champion of the free intelligence? No: his own views, so far as one can discern them, are not markedly liberal. No doubt he hates lords, kings, bishops, generals, ladies of fashion, orders, titles and flummery generally, but he does not seem to think better of the common people than of their rulers, or to be in favour of increased social equality, or to be enthusiastic about representative institutions. The Houyhnhnms are organised upon a sort of caste system which is racial in character, the horses which do the menial work being of different colours from their masters and not interbreeding with them. The educational system which Swift admires in the Lilliputians takes hereditary class distinctions for granted, and the children of the poorest classes do not go to school, because ‘their Business being only to till and cultivate the Earth… therefore their Education is of little Consequence to the Public’. Nor does he seem to have been strongly in favour of freedom of speech and the Press, in spite of the toleration which his own writings enjoyed. The King of Brobdingnag is astonished at the multiplicity of religious and political sects in England, and considers that those who hold ‘opinions prejudicial to the public’ (in the context this seems to mean simply heretical opinions), though they need not be obliged to change them, ought to be obliged to conceal them: for ‘as it was Tyranny in any Government to require the first, so it was Weakness not to enforce the second’. There is a subtler indication of Swift’s own attitude in the manner in which Gulliver leaves the land of the Houyhnhnms. Intermittently, at least, Swift was a kind of anarchist, and Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels is a picture of an anarchistic Society, not governed by law in the ordinary sense, but by the dictates of ‘Reason’, which arc voluntarily accepted by everyone. The General Assembly of the Houyhnhnms ‘exhorts’ Gulliver’s master to get rid of him, and his neighbours put pressure on him to make him comply. Two reasons are given. One is that the presence of this unusual Yahoo may unsettle the rest of the tribe, and the other is that a friendly relationship between a Houyhnhnm and a Yahoo is ‘not agreeable to Reason or Nature, or a Thing ever heard of before among them’. Gulliver’s master is somewhat unwilling to obey, but the ‘exhortation’ (a Houyhnhnm, we are told, is never compelled to do anything, he is merely ‘exhorted’ or ‘advised’) cannot be disregarded. This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is explicit in the anarchist or pacifist vision of society. In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by ‘thou shalt not’, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by ‘love’ or ‘reason’, he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else. The Houyhnhnms, we are told, were unanimous on almost all subjects. The only question they ever discussed was how to deal with the Yahoos. Otherwise there was no room for disagreement among them, because the truth is always either self-evident, or else it is undiscoverable and unimportant. They had apparently no word for ‘opinion’ in their language, and in their conversations there was no ‘difference of sentiments’. They had reached, in fact, the highest stage of totalitarian organisation, the stage when conformity has become so general that there is no need for a police force. Swift approves of this kind of thing because among his many gifts neither curiosity nor good-nature was included. Disagreement would always seem to him sheer perversity. ‘Reason,’ among the Houyhnhnms, he says, ‘is not a Point Problematical, as with us, where men can argue with Plausibility on both Sides of a Question; but strikes you with immediate Conviction; as it must needs do, where it is not mingled, obscured, or discoloured by Passion and Interest.’ In other words, we know everything already, so why should dissident opinions be tolerated? The totalitarian Society of the Houyhnhnms, where there can be no freedom and no development, follows naturally from this.

We are right to think of Swift as a rebel and iconoclast, but except in certain secondary matters, such as his insistence that women should receive the same education as men, he cannot be labelled ‘Left’. He is a Tory anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty, and preserving the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible. When Swift utters one of his characteristic diatribes against the rich and powerful, one must probably, as I said earlier, write off something for the fact that he himself belonged to the less successful party, and was personally disappointed. The ‘outs’, for obvious reasons, are always more radical than the ‘ins’. [4] But the most essential thing in Swift is his inability to believe that life – ordinary life on the solid earth, and not some rationalised, deodorised version of it – could be made worth living. Of course, no honest person claims that happiness is now a normal condition among adult human beings; but perhaps it could be made normal, and it is upon this question that all serious political controversy really turns. Swift has much in common – more, I believe, than has been noticed – with Tolstoy, another disbeliever in the possibility of happiness. In both men you have the same anarchistic outlook covering an authoritarian cast of mind; in both a similar hostility to Science, the same impatience with opponents, the same inability to see the importance of any question not interesting to themselves; and in both cases a sort of horror of the actual process of life, though in Tolstoy’s case it was arrived at later and in a different way. The sexual unhappiness of the two men was not of the same kind, but there was this in common, that in both of them a sincere loathing was mixed up with a morbid fascination. Tolstoy was a reformed rake who ended by preaching complete celibacy, while continuing to practise the opposite into extreme old age. Swift was presumably impotent, and had an exaggerated horror of human dung: he also thought about it incessantly, as is evident throughout his works. Such people are not likely to enjoy even the small amount of happiness that falls to most human beings, and, from obvious motives, are not likely to admit that earthly life is capable of much improvement. Their incuriosity, and hence their intolerance, spring from the same root.

Swift’s disgust, rancour and pessimism would make sense against the background of a ‘next world’ to which this one is the prelude. As he does not appear to believe seriously in any such thing, it becomes necessary to construct a paradise supposedly existing on the surface of the earth, but something quite different from anything we know, with all that he disapproves of – lies, folly, change, enthusiasm, pleasure, love and dirt – eliminated from it. As his ideal being he chooses the horse, an animal whose excrement is not offensive. The Houyhnhnms are dreary beasts – this is so generally admitted that the point is not worth labouring. Swift’s genius can make them credible, but there can have been very few readers in whom they have excited any feeling beyond dislike. And this is not from wounded vanity at seeing animals preferred to men; for, of the two, the Houyhnhnms are much liker to human beings than are the Yahoos, and Gulliver’s horror of the Yahoos, together with his recognition that they are the same kind of creature as himself, contains a logical absurdity. This horror comes upon him at his very first sight of them. ‘I never beheld,’ he says, ‘in all my Travels, so disagreeable an Animal, nor one against which I naturally conceived so strong an Antipathy.’ But in comparison with what are the Yahoos disgusting? Not with the Houyhnhnms, because at this time Gulliver has not seen a Houyhnhnm. It can only be in comparison with himself, i.e. with a human being. Later, however, we are to be told that the Yahoos are human beings, and human society becomes insupportable to Gulliver because all men are Yahoos. In that case why did he not conceive his disgust of humanity earlier? In effect we are told that the Yahoos are fantastically different from men, and yet are the same. Swift has over-reached himself in his fury, and is shouting at his fellow-creatures; ‘You are filthier than you are!’ However, it is impossible to feel much sympathy with the Yahoos, and it is not because they oppress the Yahoos that the Houyhnhnms are unattractive. They are unattractive because the ‘Reason’ by which they are governed is really a desire for death. They are exempt from love, friendship, curiosity, fear, sorrow and – except in their feelings towards the Yahoos, who occupy rather the same place in their community as the Jews in Nazi Germany – anger and hatred. ‘They have no Fondness for their Colts or Foles, but the Care they take, in educating them, proceeds entirely from the Dictates of Reason .’ They lay store by ‘Friendship’ and ‘Benevolence’, but ‘these are not confined to particular Objects, but universal to the whole Race’. They also value conversation, but in their conversations there are no differences of opinion, and ‘nothing passed but what was useful, expressed in the fewest and most significant Words’. They practise strict birth control, each couple producing two offspring and thereafter abstaining from sexual intercourse. Their marriages are arranged for them by their elders, on eugenic principles, and their language contains no word for ‘love’, in the sexual sense. When somebody dies they carry on exactly as before, without feeling any grief. It will be seen that their aim is to be as like a corpse as is possible while retaining physical life. One or two of their characteristics, it is true, do not seem to be strictly ‘reasonable’ in their own usage of the word. Thus, they place a great value not only on physical hardihood but on athleticism, and they are devoted to poetry. But these exceptions may be less arbitrary than they seem. Swift probably emphasises the physical strength of the Houyhnhnms in order to make clear that they could never be conquered by the hated human race, while a taste for poetry may figure among their qualities because poetry appeared to Swift as the antithesis of Science, from his point of view the most useless of all pursuits. In Part III he names ‘Imagination, Fancy, and Invention’ as desirable faculties in which the Laputan mathematicians (in spite of their love of music) were wholly lacking. One must remember that although Swift was an admirable writer of comic verse, the kind of poetry he thought valuable would probably be didactic poetry. The poetry of the Houyhnhnms, he says,

must be allowed to excel (that of) all other Mortals; wherein the Justness of their Similes, and the Minuteness, as well as exactness, of their Descriptions, are, indeed, inimitable. Their Verses abound very much in both of these; and usually contain either some exalted Notions of Friendship and Benevolence, or the Praises of those who were Victors in Races, and other bodily Exercises.

Alas, not even the genius of Swift was equal to producing a specimen by which we could judge the poetry of the Houyhnhnms. But it sounds as though it were chilly stuff (in heroic couplets, presumably), and not seriously in conflict with the principles of ‘Reason’.

Happiness is notoriously difficult to describe, and pictures of a just and well-ordered Society are seldom either attractive or convincing. Most creators of ‘favourable’ Utopias, however, are concerned to show what life could be like if it were lived more fully. Swift advocates a simple refusal of life, justifying this by the claim that ‘Reason’ consists in thwarting your instincts. The Houyhnhnms, creatures without a history, continue for generation after generation to live prudently, maintaining their population at exactly the same level, avoiding all passion, suffering from no diseases, meeting death indifferently, training up their young in the same principles – and all for what? In order that the same process may continue indefinitely. The notions that life here and now is worth living, or that it could be made worth living, or that it must be sacrificed for some future good, are all absent. The dreary world of the Houyhnhnms was about as good a Utopia as Swift could construct, granting that he neither believed in a ‘next world’ nor could get any pleasure out of certain normal activities. But it is not really set up as something desirable in itself, but as the justification for another attack on humanity. The aim, as usual, is to humiliate Man by reminding him that he is weak and ridiculous, and above all that he stinks; and the ultimate motive, probably, is a kind of envy, the envy of the ghost for the living, of the man who knows he cannot be happy for the others who – so he fears – may be a little happier than himself. The political expression of such an outlook must be either reactionary or nihilistic, because the person who holds it will want to prevent Society from developing in some direction in which his pessimism may be cheated. One can do this either by blowing everything to pieces, or by averting social change. Swift ultimately blew everything to pieces in the only way that was feasible before the atomic bomb – that is, he went mad – but, as I have tried to show, his political aims were on the whole reactionary ones.

From what I have written it may have seemed that I am against Swift, and that my object is to refute him and even to belittle him. In a political and moral sense I am against him, so far as I understand him. Yet curiously enough he is one of the writers I admire with least reserve, and Gulliver’s Travels , in particular, is a book which it seems impossible for me to grow tired of. I read it first when I was eight – one day short of eight, to be exact, for I stole and furtively read the copy which was to be given me next day on my eighth birthday – and I have certainly not read it less than half a dozen times since. Its fascination seems inexhaustible. If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them. This raises the question: what is the relationship between agreement with a writer’s opinions, and enjoyment of his work?

If one is capable of intellectual detachment, one can perceive merit in a writer whom one deeply disagrees with, but enjoyment is a different matter. Supposing that there is such a thing as good or bad art, then the goodness or badness must reside in the work of art itself – not independently of the observer, indeed, but independently of the mood of the observer. In one sense, therefore, it cannot be true that a poem is good on Monday and bad on Tuesday. But if one judges the poem by the appreciation it arouses, then it can certainly be true, because appreciation, or enjoyment, is a subjective condition which cannot be commanded. For a great deal of his waking life, even the most cultivated person has no aesthetic feelings whatever, and the power to have aesthetic feelings is very easily destroyed. When you are frightened, or hungry, or are suffering from toothache or sea-sickness, King Lear is no better from your point of view than Peter Pan . You may know in an intellectual sense that it is better, but that is simply a fact which you remember: you will not feel the merit of King Lear until you are normal again. And aesthetic judgment can be upset just as disastrously – more disastrously, because the cause is less readily recognised – by political or moral disagreement. If a book angers, wounds or alarms you, then you will not enjoy it, whatever its merits may be. If it seems to you a really pernicious book, likely to influence other people in some undesirable way, then you will probably construct an aesthetic theory to show that it has no merits. Current literary criticism consists quite largely of this kind of dodging to and fro between two sets of standards. And yet the opposite process can also happen: enjoyment can overwhelm disapproval, even though one clearly recognises that one is enjoying something inimical. Swift, whose world-view is so peculiarly unacceptable, but who is nevertheless an extremely popular writer, is a good instance of this. Why is it that we don’t mind being called Yahoos, although firmly convinced that we are not Yahoos?

It is not enough to make the usual answer that of course Swift was wrong, in fact he was insane, but he was ‘a good writer’. It is true that the literary quality of a book is to some small extent separable from its subject-matter. Some people have a native gift for using words, as some people have a naturally ‘good eye’ at games. It is largely a question of timing and of instinctively knowing how much emphasis to use. As an example near at hand, look back at the passage I quoted earlier, starting ‘In the Kingdom of Tribnia, by the Natives called Langdon’. It derives much of its force from the final sentence: ‘And this is the anagram-made Method.’ Strictly speaking this sentence is unnecessary, for we have already seen the anagram deciphered, but the mock-solemn repetition, in which one seems to hear Swift’s own voice uttering the words, drives home the idiocy of the activities described, like a final tap to a nail. But not all the power and simplicity of Swift’s prose, nor the imaginative effort that has been able to make not one but a whole series of impossible worlds more credible than the majority of history books – none of this would enable us to enjoy Swift if his world-view were truly wounding or shocking. Millions of people, in many countries, must have enjoyed Gulliver’s Travels while more or less seeing its anti-human implications: and even the child who accepts Parts I and II as a simple story gets a sense of absurdity from thinking of human beings six inches high. The explanation must be that Swift’s world-view is felt to be not altogether false – or it would probably be more accurate to say, not false all the time. Swift is a diseased writer. He remains permanently in a depressed mood which in most people is only intermittent, rather as though someone suffering from jaundice or the after-effects of influenza should have the energy to write books. But we all know that mood, and something in us responds to the expression of it. Take, for instance, one of his most characteristic works, The Lady’s Dressing Room : one might add the kindred poem, Upon a Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed . Which is truer, the viewpoint expressed in these poems, or the viewpoint implied in Blake’s phrase, ‘The naked female human form divine’? No doubt Blake is nearer the truth, and yet who can fail to feel a sort of pleasure in seeing that fraud, feminine delicacy, exploded for once? Swift falsifies his picture of the world by refusing to see anything in human life except dirt, folly and wickedness, but the part which he abstracts from the whole does exist, and it is something which we all know about while shrinking from mentioning it. Part of our minds – in any normal person it is the dominant part – believes that man is a noble animal and life is worth living: but there is also a sort of inner self which at least intermittently stands aghast at the horror of existence. In the queerest way, pleasure and disgust are linked together. The human body is beautiful: it is also repulsive and ridiculous, a fact which can be verified at any swimming pool. The sexual organs are objects of desire and also of loathing, so much so that in many languages, if not in all languages, their names are used as words of abuse. Meat is delicious, but a butcher’s shop makes one feel sick: and indeed all our food springs ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things which of all others seem to us the most horrible. A child, when it is past the infantile stage but still looking at the world with fresh eyes, is moved by horror almost as often as by wonder – horror of snot and spittle, of the dogs’ excrement on the pavement, the dying toad full of maggots, the sweaty smell of grown-ups, the hideousness of old men, with their bald heads and bulbous noses. In his endless harping on disease, dirt and deformity, Swift is not actually inventing anything, he is merely leaving something out. Human behaviour, too, especially in politics, is as he describes it, although it contains other more important factors which he refuses to admit. So far as we can see, both horror and pain are necessary to the continuance of life on this planet, and it is therefore open to pessimists like Swift to say: ‘If horror and pain must always be with us, how can life be significantly improved?’ His attitude is in effect the Christian attitude, minus the bribe of a ‘next world’ – which, however, probably has less hold upon the minds of believers than the conviction that this world is a vale of tears and the grave is a place of rest. It is, I am certain, a wrong attitude, and one which could have harmful effects upon behaviour; but something in us responds to it, as it responds to the gloomy words of the burial service and the sweetish smell of corpses in a country church.

It is often argued, at least by people who admit the importance of subject-matter, that a book cannot be ‘good’ if it expresses a palpably false view of life. We are told that in our own age, for instance, any book that has genuine literary merit will also be more or less ‘progressive’ in tendency. This ignores the fact that throughout history a similar struggle between progress and reaction has been raging, and that the best books of any one age have always been written from several different viewpoints, some of them palpably more false than others. In so far as a writer is a propagandist, the most one can ask of him is that he shall genuinely believe in what he is saying, and that it shall not be something blazingly silly. Today, for example, one can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, pacifist, an anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative: one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku Klux KIan. The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask of him is talent, which is probably another name for conviction. Swift did not possess ordinary wisdom, but he did possess a terrible intensity of vision, capable of picking out a single hidden truth and then magnifying it and distorting it. The durability of Gulliver’s Travels goes to show that, if the force of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art.

Orwell’s Notes

[1] Houyhnhnms too old to walk are described as being carried in ‘sledges’ or in ‘a kind of vehicle, drawn like a sledge’. Presumably these had no wheels.

[2] The physical decadence which Swift claims to have observed may have been a reality at that date. He attributes it to syphilis, which was a new disease in Europe and may have been more virulent than it is now. Distilled liquors, also, were a novelty in the seventeenth century and must have led at first to a great increase in drunkenness.

[4] At the end of the book, as typical specimens of human folly and viciousness, Swift names ‘a Lawyer, a Pickpocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a Politician, a Whore-master, a Physician, an Evidence, a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traitor, or the like’. One sees here the irresponsible violence of the powerless. The list lumps together those who break the conventional code, and those who keep it. For instance, if you automatically condemn a colonel, as such, on what grounds do you condemn a traitor? Or again, if you want to suppress pickpockets, you must have laws, which means that you must have lawyers. But the whole closing passage, in which the hatred is so authentic, and the reason given for it so inadequate, is somehow unconvincing. One has the feeling that personal animosity is at work.

Polemic , No. 5, September–October 1946

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the United States, and is reproduced here with the kind assistance of the Orwell Estate .

Become a Friend
Become an International Friend
The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness

We use cookies. By browsing our site you agree to our use of cookies. Accept

The PhD Experience

Call for Contributions

George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing: A Reassessment

https://unsplash.com/photos/FHnnjk1Yj7Y

By Daniel Adamson |

In April 1946, George Orwell published a short essay entitled “Politics and the English Language”. Orwell’s clear intention was to remedy the pervasive ‘ugly and inaccurate’ written English in contemporary literature.

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.

Ultimately, Orwell’s efforts were underpinned by political concerns, in an era where propaganda had become the arme de choix of a range of oppressive political movements.

“Politics and the English Language” has become best known for its suggested six rules of writing, which might be employed in order to avoid poor writing. Since their publication, these guidelines have become much loved from amateur literary blogs to self-help websites.

Nonetheless, Orwell’s rules deserve reassessment. Much has changed since 1946: the map of Europe has been redrawn, 140-character tweets have become a primary mode of communication, and a global health crisis has brought the world to a standstill. Do Orwell’s rules, therefore, still hold firm? And what lessons might a PhD student garner from reading them?

Rules for writing or rules for life?

Let us take Orwell’s six rules in turn, and consider the resonance each recommendation could carry for a PhD researcher in the twenty-first century

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print

Originality is certainly a watchword of many PhD projects. The ability to break new ground within a dissertation is admirable. However, the quest to express oneself in an unprecedented way should not obscure the clear presentation of research findings. In some cases, certain metaphors or similes have become integrated into the English language precisely because they capture a sentiment in a particularly effective manner. In this case, their replication in a passage of PhD prose could be justified. A preoccupation with originality of prose has the converse potential to lead to the creation of phrases which are simply inappropriate. If writers cannot bring themselves to use an established figure of speech, the best advice might be to avoid elaborate language altogether: simply state an idea in plain terms.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

Concision is essential in PhD research. A reader must be able to take away a clear picture of research findings. Equally, in the time-pressed academic world, accessible prose is a valued characteristic. The academic community is also global. English may not be the first language of any given reader. As such, the avoidance of archaic or obscure vocabulary is a sensible measure.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Orwell’s prioritisation of economical prose will speak to many PhD students. A limit of 100,000 words is, at first, daunting for many researchers when starting to write a dissertation. Often, however, the eventual challenge will be deciding which words to omit from a final draft. As such, the implications of Orwell’s advice are sound. If a long phrase can be substituted for a shorter one, it creates more room for the inclusion of useful insights.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Of all Orwell’s rules, this is perhaps the recommendation which is most dependent on personal preference. As long as the use of the passive voice does not obscure the clarity of prose (see rules 2 and 3), it seems somewhat drastic to forbid its use altogether. Rule number 4 might better be adapted to provide advice for life, rather than writing: ‘never be passive where you can be active’. The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated how opportunities can be snatched away in a tragically short period of time. As such, PhD students must take initiative in maximising their chances when they become available. Seek out what can be done given contextual circumstances, rather than waiting for opportunities to present themselves unprompted.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

The fifth rule in Orwell’s list is perhaps only partially applicable to PhD research publications. Particularly in scientific subjects, the use of technical vocabulary is unavoidable. Even in the arts and humanities, foreign words frequently can capture a notion that eludes the boundaries of the English language: glasnost , zeitgeist , détente and so forth. Once again, the use of specified words should not be pretentious, nor detract from the lucidity of research. One potential strategy is to include approximate English translations or explanations for more esoteric language.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

In all areas of academic life, the avoidance of barbarity should be encouraged. There is often little to gain from cruelty towards the work of others. Commonly, such conduct is merely a way of exerting power over those less senior, and is almost never constructive. Criticism is a necessary element of the PhD experience. However, it is most effective when it is used to improve research, rather than to belittle work. ‘Be kind’ has emerged as a maxim of the Coronavirus-era, and it is a motto which all academics should observe.

Respect, not rigidity

Overall, few would argue that Orwell’s six rules of writing do not provide a solid base around which to centre prose. Orwell did not intend his guidelines to be used by postgraduates, but PhD students can find value in several different aspects of the guidelines, particularly in relation to the economy and clarity of writing.

Orwell’s recommendations command respect, even in the twenty-first century. However, it is also rather tyrannical to suggest that a rigid set of rules should dictate universal writing habits. In this blog alone, Orwell’s rules have probably been broken in various ways.

The deployment of the English language is a highly-personalised action, and one which lends human beings a sense of individual character. PhD projects can benefit from a stamp of personality. If it takes breaking some of Orwell’s rules to achieve this in a dissertation, PhD students should proceed with confidence. Moderation, as always, is key.

Daniel Adamson is a PhD student in the History Department at Durham University. He tweets at @DanielEAdamson.

Image 1 (open copyright): https://www.vautiercommunications.com/blog/6-rules-for-writing-george-orwell

Share this post:

September 10, 2020

academia , Phd , writing

academia , politics , research , thesis , writing , writing up

Search this blog

Orwell's Arresting Ambiguities

D. J. Taylor judiciously steers a course between hagiography and debunking.

George Orwell said that Charles Dickens was an author well worth stealing, which is to say, attaching to one’s cause whatever it might be. If you can say “Dickens would have thought likewise,” you are claiming the approval not only of a genius, but of a man of deeply generous and humane nature (never mind any squalid revelations about his actual biography).

George Orwell has suffered something of the same fate: thanks to a kind of secular beatification, everyone wants to claim him. He is, so to speak, the voice of unvarnished truth in a world of prevailing untruth. Like George Washington, he could not tell a lie.

The problem with such beatification is that it easily provokes an equal and opposite effort at debunking, which is as unrealistic as the process of beatification itself. It sometimes seems as if feet of clay are the modern biographer’s favourite feature of whoever their subject may be. But in this brief but not shallow, well-written, and entertaining guide to the life and work of George Orwell, D. J. Taylor, who has written not one but two biographies of Orwell (no accumulation of evidence about so prolific and protean an author can ever be final), judiciously steers between hagiography and debunking. His Orwell is a complex man, tormented and conflicted to some degree but also, overall, admirable. The fact that Orwell was not all of a piece and contained contradictions within himself is what lends depth to his work. There may be better books about Orwell than this, but if so I do not know them.

Taylor, whose knowledge of both the life and work of Orwell is clearly profound, draws them seamlessly together so that they are mutually enlightening. This is, in my opinion, literary criticism as it ought to be. Completely free of the disfiguring jargon or ideology that makes so much academic criticism completely incomprehensible, unreadable, or not worth the effort of reading, Taylor’s book encourages its reader to return to Orwell’s books, or to read them for the first time. He convincingly treats his books prior to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as interesting and worthwhile in themselves, and not merely as teleological stepping-stones to the two books that almost everyone knows who reads anything at all.

This last claim, incidentally, is of the type that Orwell made his own, of which Taylor gives several examples in his chapter on one of Orwell’s obsessions, prose style (Taylor’s book is cleverly organised both thematically and biographically, so that you cannot say which is uppermost). Thus Orwell wrote “If you want to know what a dead man’s relatives think of him, a good rough test is the weight of his tombstone” and “Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist.” These ex cathedra observations are not meant to be the conclusion of a Pew-type survey in which, for example, a representative sample of intelligent sixteen-year-old boys has been canvassed for their opinions. They are, rather, statements that are part poetic, part philosophical, part abstract, and part empirical in nature, without being truths in the most absolute and literal sense. Orwell paid his readers the compliment of assuming that they would understand this, and indeed may have been instrumental in helping them to do so.

Orwell was as much a romantic conservative as a socialist radical, his occasional lapses into blood-curdling revolutionism notwithstanding.

Writing about Orwell’s subject matter in such a way that every last statement was backed up by a panoply of statistical evidence would be intolerably dull and would not necessarily be more accurate as a result. Intuition as well as data is necessary, though of course relying too much on the former carries the risk of merely confirming one’s prejudices. Judgment is what is necessary, and Orwell often, though not always, had it. Incidentally, to say that every intelligent sixteen-year-old boy is a socialist is not necessarily unreserved praise of socialism, though Orwell meant it as such, to imply that socialism was merely a matter of common sense.

Occasionally Taylor, whose own judgment is pretty good, misses something important. For example, he describes the effect that Orwell’s time in Spain had on him:

Spain, it is safe to say, politicised Orwell in a way that his exposure to homegrown socialism in the previous five years had not. To begin with, it offered him a vision of how an alternative world, founded on the principles of freedom and equality, might work.

Orwell told the general litterateur, Cyril Connolly, who had been with him at Eton, that he had seen “wonderful things” in Barcelona, then a revolutionary city in the control of the Trotskyist POUM . Taylor continues:

It was, he declared, “the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.” Churches were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Shops and cafes bore inscriptions saying that they had been collectivised. Tipping was forbidden by law, all private motor cars had been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis had been painted in the anarchist colours of red and black. “In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.”

Everyone dressed the same too, in drab overalls, Maoist avant la lettre .

Barcelona, then, was a Catalonian Pyongyang: and it is important to recall that Orwell approved of it. At this stage of his development, he was an enthusiastic totalitarian, and the shallowness of his belief that such uniformity was a triumph for freedom and equality is rather startling in a man who, a very few years later, was to be the greatest literary scourge of totalitarianism in the world. It was all to the credit of Orwell that he changed his opinion of totalitarianism so diametrically, but had he died just after the publication of Homage to Catalonia , not living long enough to write his anti-totalitarian masterpieces, he would have been remembered, if he was remembered at all, as a literary forerunner and praise-singer of some of the worst features of communist regimes. It had to be remembered too that his underlying objection to Stalin’s policy in Spain was that it was not revolutionary enough, that he promoted the Popular Front, albeit as a mere tactic, rather than the immediate revolution, à la Barcelona, as Orwell would have liked.

There is another important omission that occurs in the discussion of Orwell’s somewhat po-faced essay on boy’s weeklies, in which he severely criticised the work of Frank Richards (whose real name was Charles Hamilton, and who probably wrote more words than any other man in history, up to 30,000 a day, highly stylised as they were). Richards invented a character, Billy Bunter, a fat, lazy, boastful, stupid, greedy schoolboy whom generations of English children came to love not despite, but because of, his vices—an important moral lesson, one might have thought. Orwell attacked Richards’ work on political grounds, since Bunter attended a fictional private school, Greyfriars, a kind of which most of Richards’ readers could have had no experience. Orwell thought that this was reactionary, in effect a prop to the unjust status quo.

He probably imagined that Richards was just a hack, but in fact, Richards was an ardent classicist who read Horace for pleasure, and he proved a formidable controversialist who got much the better of Orwell in his reply to the article. In this instance, Orwell had picked an argument that he could not win.

But of course, it is no criticism of a relatively short book like this that it does not say all that it might have said. What is so admirable in it is the author’s ability to descry threads running through Orwell’s books that speak to his character. Orwell was as much a romantic conservative as a socialist radical, his occasional lapses into blood-curdling revolutionism notwithstanding (as late as 1941, in The Lion and the Unicorn , he wrote that it might be necessary to shoot a few reactionaries in order to establish a new socialist order in England, apparently not realising how quickly in such circumstances a few become many).

Taylor brings out very well the ambiguities in Orwell’s thought and, especially, in his emotions. He was almost a golden ageist with respect to the Edwardian era (in which he had his early childhood), and if he had lived at a different time, he might well have been a writer such as Gilbert White who wrote The Natural History of Selbourne . He had a real knowledge of, and feeling for, natural history: his essay on the common toad is a small masterpiece. Although Orwell thought that A. E. Housman’s poems were “tinkling” (a judgment I think mistaken), the sentiment expressed by Housman in the mouth of a twenty-year-old boy in A Shropshire Lad could very much have been his:

And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.

Orwell did not have fifty years to live, let alone seventy. Perhaps for the good of his subsequent reputation, he died at the very acme of his career, having just completed an undoubted masterpiece that, notwithstanding the implosion of the Soviet Union, remains, alas, of strong current resonance.

I recommend this book unreservedly. It deals most sensitively with Orwell’s multiple ambiguities without trying to fit them into a Procrustean bed. It informs, enlightens, and entertains. It restores one’s faith in the value of criticism.

Book Review Market Liberalism, Chinese-Style Samuel Gregg

Essay China’s Three-Body Problem—and Ours Spencer A. Klavan

Book Review Hungary’s “Surprise Attack” David P. Goldman

Forum The End is Not Nigh James M. Patterson

Essay Flying the Unfriendly Skies David Krugler

Supported by

New ‘Lord of the Rings’ Movie Will Put Gollum Center Stage

Andy Serkis, who played the creature in the trilogy, will direct and star in “The Hunt for Gollum,” an expansion of the fantasy epic scheduled for 2026.

Share full article

Three characters, including a balding creature, peer over a rock wall.

By Emmanuel Morgan

The next movie in the “Lord of the Rings” franchise will focus on Gollum, one of the series’s most recognizable characters, Warner Bros. Pictures announced on Thursday.

Andy Serkis, who played the miniature creature in the original film trilogy, will direct and star in “Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum,” which is scheduled for 2026, the studio said in a news release.

Another “Lord of the Rings” movie will follow “The Hunt for Gollum,” Warner Bros. said. The original trilogy’s director, Peter Jackson, and screenwriters, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, will act as producers on both films. A separate animated movie directed by Kenji Kamiyama, “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” will be released in December.

“Yesssss, Precious,” Serkis said in a statement. “The time has come once more to venture into the unknown with my dear friends, the extraordinary and incomparable guardians of Middle-earth.”

In addition to his work in “The Lord of the Rings,” Serkis played Caesar in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise and Supreme Leader Snoke in “Star Wars” movies. He has directed “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” and “Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle” and is leading an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

The “Lord of the Rings” movies are based on a series of fantasy novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. The trilogy directed by Jackson — “ The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring ” (2001), “ The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers ” (2002) and “ The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ” (2003) — grossed $3 billion combined.

About a decade later, Jackson directed a three-part movie series based on Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.” Amazon Prime Video released the Middle-earth show “The Rings of Power” in 2022.

The announcement of two new “Lord of the Rings” movies comes as David Zaslav, the chief executive of the studio’s parent company, faces criticism for receiving $49.7 million in compensation last year despite the company’s financial troubles. The conglomerate is also reportedly in jeopardy of losing its rights to broadcast National Basketball Association games .

Emmanuel Morgan reports on sports, pop culture and entertainment. More about Emmanuel Morgan

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help.a.

Andy Serkis, the star of the earlier “Planet of the Apes” movies, and Owen Teague, the new lead, discuss the latest film in the franchise , “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.”

The HBO series “The Sympathizer” is not just a good story, it’s a sharp piece of criticism on Vietnam war movies, our critic writes .

In “Dark Matter,” the new Apple TV+ techno-thriller, a portal to parallel realities allows people to visit new worlds and revisit their own past decisions .

The tennis movie “Challengers” comes to an abrupt stop midmatch, so we don’t know who won. Does that matter? Our critics have thoughts .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime and Hulu to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

IMAGES

Politics and the English Language: And Other Essays by George Orwell
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell Essay
Politics and the English Language
️ George orwell essay politics and the english language summary. George
≫ Politics and the English Language by George Orwell Free Essay Sample
"Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell

VIDEO

What "Orwellian" really means
LITERATURE
1984
1984
1984
1984

COMMENTS

Politics and the English Language
Politics and the English Language. This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the permission of the Orwell Estate.If you value these resources, please consider making a donation or joining us as a Friend to help maintain them for readers everywhere.. Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English ...
A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell's 'Politics and the English
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'Politics and the English Language' (1946) is one of the best-known essays by George Orwell (1903-50). As its title suggests, Orwell identifies a link between the (degraded) English language of his time and the degraded political situation: Orwell sees modern discourse (especially political discourse) as being less a matter…
Politics and the English Language
Cover of the Penguin edition "Politics and the English Language" (1946) is an essay by George Orwell that criticised the "ugly and inaccurate" written English of his time and examined the connection between political orthodoxies and the debasement of language. The essay focused on political language, which, according to Orwell, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable ...
Politics and the English Language Summary
Introduction. George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" was published in 1946 in the literary magazine Horizon.Though modern considerations of Orwell more often focus on his ...
Politics and the English Language
Analysis. To begin, Orwell outlines three common assumptions. First, that the English language is regularly misused and abused. Second, that the downfall of the English language mirrors the "decadence" (or moral denigration spurred by excessiveness) of English-speaking "civilization.". With both of these first two points, Orwell agrees ...
Politics and the English Language
George Orwell's essay examines the power of language to shape political ideas. It is about the importance of writing concisely, clearly and precisely and the dangers to our ability to think when language, especially political language, is obscured by vague, clichéd phrases and hackneyed metaphors. In it, he argues that when political discourse trades clarity and precision for stock phrases ...
Politics and the English Language
George Orwell set out 'to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature - his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell's ...
Politics And The English Language
george orwell, politics, english, propaganda, essay Collection ... Original publication of George Orwells essay "Politics and the English Language" from the April 1946 issue of the journal Horizon (volume 13, issue 76, pages 252-265). Addeddate 2015-03-23 04:47:41 Identifier PoliticsAndTheEnglishLanguage ...
"Politics and the English Language." By George Orwell
Orwell dramatizes this assertion in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Published three years after "Politics and the English Language," the iconic dystopic novel imagines a futuristic government that manipulates language so that its citizens conform in thought, word, and deed to a narrow political orthodoxy. Language, in fact, is the primary change ...
Writing, Ideology, and Politics: Orwell's 'Politics and the English
With these ideas in mind, I will offer a reading of George Orwell's 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language,"2 and will then use my reading to develop a more general argument about compositional pedagogy and the nature of writing itself. If success is measured by academic attention, Orwell's essay must be one of
Politics and the English Language Themes
In his essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell 's central point is that bad writing produces bad politics. According to Orwell, a culture full of lazily written nonsense enables governments to control citizens through deceptive messaging. This is because lazy writing leads to lazy thinking—or, rather, to a lack of ...
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell Plot Summary
George Orwell 's central argument is that the normalization of bad writing leads to political oppression. Orwell starts with the premise that the distortion of "language" reflects a "corruption" of "civilization." But Orwell objects to the conclusion he believes readers usually draw from this initial premise. Specifically, Orwell claims that most readers—even those who think ...
George Orwell: Politics and the English Language -- Index page
Politics and the English Language. George Orwell. Politics and the English Language, 1946 [L.m./F.s.: 2019-12-29 / 0.15 KiB] '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 ...
PDF Politics and the English Language
Politics and the English Language. George Orwell. Politics and the English Language. 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− ...
The Best George Orwell Essays Everyone Should Read
The English language is 'in a bad way', Orwell argues in this famous essay from 1946. As its title suggests, Orwell identifies a link between the (degraded) English language of his time and the degraded political situation: Orwell sees modern political discourse as being less a matter of words chosen for their clear meanings than a series of stock phrases slung together.
George Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'
Word Matters, episode 85. George Orwell published his famous essay "Politics and the English Language" in 1946, and we mostly wish he hadn't. Hosted by Emily Brewster, Ammon Shea, and Peter Sokolowski. Produced in collaboration with New England Public Media. Download the episode here.
George Orwell
George Orwell. Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. [2] His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism. [3]
Writers on Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"
June 23, 2017. If you've ever thought of yourself as a writer, chances are that you have opinions about George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language.". First published in 1946, it has since become required reading for intro-level writing classes, as well as an obligatory citation when discussing politics and rhetoric.
On Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'
First published in 1946, George Orwell's commentary on political language remains culturally salient. Preoccupied with the 'decay' of his mother tongue and the political implications inherent to such a decline, Orwell defines the source of such linguistic decadence as a 'reduced state of consciousness' in which the metaphor is dead, and pretentiousness prevails.
Politics vs. Literature: An examination of Gulliver's Travels
Politics vs. Literature: An examination of Gulliver's Travels. This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate.The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity - please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere.
George Orwell's Six Rules for Writing: A Reassessment
In April 1946, George Orwell published a short essay entitled "Politics and the English Language". Orwell's clear intention was to remedy the pervasive 'ugly and inaccurate' written English in contemporary literature. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided ...
George Orwell
Essay. 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.
Orwell's Arresting Ambiguities
Orwell attacked Richards' work on political grounds, since Bunter attended a fictional private school, Greyfriars, a kind of which most of Richards' readers could have had no experience. Orwell thought that this was reactionary, in effect a prop to the unjust status quo. ... his essay on the common toad is a small masterpiece. Although ...
New 'Lord of the Rings' Movie Will Put Gollum Center Stage
The next movie in the "Lord of the Rings" franchise will focus on Gollum, one of the series's most recognizable characters, Warner Bros. Pictures announced on Thursday.