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 — must inevitably share in the general collap. It follows that any struggle against the abu of language is a ntimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purpos.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic caus: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cau, reinforcing the original cau and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink becau he feels himlf to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely becau he drinks. It is rather the same th
ing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate becau our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of the habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this prently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
七拼八凑打一数字The five passages have not been picked out becau they are especially bad — I could have quoted far wor if I had chon — but becau they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly reprentative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:
1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once emed not unlike a venteenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit ct which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with职业价值观有哪些 for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder网络情歌.
Professor Lancelot Hogben (工龄工资计算公式Interglossia手机前十名排行榜)
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreduci
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ble, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itlf is nothing but the mutual reflection of the lf-cure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)
4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rou the agitated petty-bourgeoi to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infud into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious
reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at prent is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the prent priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of the passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something el, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or
not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English pro, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raid, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one ems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: pro consists less and less of words chon for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phras tacked together like the ctions of a prefabricated hen-hou. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of pro-construction is habitually dodged.
