George Orwell, seudónimo de Eric Arthur Blair (Motihari, Raj Británico, 25 de junio de 1903 – Londres, Reino Unido, 21 de enero de 1950), fue un escritor y periodista británico,
cuya obra lleva la marca de las experiencias personales vividas por el
autor en tres etapas de su vida: su posición en contra del imperialismo británico que lo llevó al compromiso como representante de las fuerzas del orden colonial en Birmania
durante su juventud; a favor de la justicia social, después de haber
observado y sufrido las condiciones de vida de las clases sociales de
los trabajadores de Londres y París; en contra de los totalitarismos nazi y stalinista tras su participación en la Guerra Civil Española.
"Politics and the English Language" (en español: "La política y el idioma inglés") (1946) es un ensayo escrito por George Orwell en el cual critica el inglés escrito contemporáneo por ser "feo e impreciso".
Orwell sostiene que la prosa de naturaleza política fue creada para
"hacer que las mentiras parezcan verdades y el asesinato respetable, y
para darle una apariencia de solidez a lo que sólo es viento". Orwell
creía que dado que el objetivo de estos escritos era ocultar la verdad
en lugar de expresarla, el lenguaje utilizado era necesariamente
impreciso o carente de sentido. Esta prosa falta de claridad era un
estilo que se había "contagiado" a aquellos que no tenían intenciones de
ocultar la verdad, resultando en el ocultamiento de las ideas del
escritor ante sí mismo y sus lectores. En cambio Orwell propugna por el uso del denominado inglés llano ("plain english").
- 印刷物で見慣れた暗喩や直喩、その他の比喩を使うな。
- 短い言葉で用が足りる時に、長い言葉を使うな。
- ある言葉を削れるのであれば、常に削れ。
- 能動態を使える時に、受動態を使うな。
- 相当する日常的な英語が思い付く時に、外国語や学術用語、専門用語を使うな。
- あからさまに野蛮な文章を書くくらいなら、これらの規則のどれでもすぐに破れ。
John Rodden はオーウェルの著作の多くは反論の余地があると述べ、オーウェルがしばしばこれらの規則に違反していると主張し、オーウェル自身もこの規則を収録した正にその随筆の中で、自分が疑いなくこれらの規則の幾つかに違反していると認めています。それにも関わらず、これらの規則は現代の書き手の教本として、今なお広く採用されています。
Original text - Texto original (en inglés) - 原文:
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit
that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we
cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and
our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general
collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a
sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to
aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a
natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political
and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that
individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original
cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on
indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,
and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same
thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate
because 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 these habits one can think more clearly,
and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so
that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive
concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope
that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer.
Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now
habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I
could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate
various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the
average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can
refer back to them when necessary:
- I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.Professor Harold Laski(Essay in Freedom of Expression )
- Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate , or put at a loss for bewilder .Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia )
- On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side ,the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?Essay on psychology in Politics (New York )
- All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.Communist pamphlet
- If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable
ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of
imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and
cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost
indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of
vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern
English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as
certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems
able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and
less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of
phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I
list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the
work of prose construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a
visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead"
(e.g. iron resolution ) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word
and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two
classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative
power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing
phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel
for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play
into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled
waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed . Many of
these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for
instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the
writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have
been twisted out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being
aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as
tow the line . Another example is the hammer and the anvil , now
always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real
life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a
writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the
original phrase.
Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking
out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with
extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases
are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to,
give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role)
in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of,
etc.,etc . The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being
a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill , a verb becomes a
phrase , made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose
verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render . In addition, the passive
voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun
constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of
by examining ). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the
-ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an
appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple
conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to,
having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on
the hypothesis that ; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by
such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of
account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious
consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion , and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as
noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote,
constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate , are used to
dress up a simple statement and give an aire of scientific impartiality to biased
judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable,
triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable , are used to dignify
the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at
glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being:
realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner,
jackboot, clarion . Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac,
ancien r&eacutgime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo,
gleichschaltung, weltanschauung , are used to give an air of culture and
elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g. , and etc.
, there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in
the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and
sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek
words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite,
ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous , and
hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers. The
jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois,
these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard , etc.) consists largely
of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of
coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and,
where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this
kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so
forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The
result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness. Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art
criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which
are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic,
values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality , as used in art
criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point
to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.
When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living
quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's
work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference
opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of
the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that
language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly
abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it
signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom,
patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings
which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like
democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make
one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a
country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind
of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop
using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the
person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to
think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a
true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is
opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other
words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are:
class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois,
equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give
another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of
its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English
into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from
Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance,
contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have
not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the
original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations --
race, battle, bread -- dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in
competitive activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind
I am discussing -- no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations
of contemporary phenomena" -- would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise
and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains
forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of
everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables:
eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first
sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that
could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase,
and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the
meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of
sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate.
This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur
here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a
few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much
nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking
out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the
meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have
already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by
sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is
easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is
not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use
ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also
don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are
generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in
a hurry -- when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a
public speech -- it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags
like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a
conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence
from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you
save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for
your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The
sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash --
as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into
the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a
mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really
thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay.
Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is
superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the
slip -- alien for akin -- making further nonsense, and several avoidable
pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2)
plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and,
while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to
look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one
takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one
could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which
it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an
accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In
(5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this
manner usually have a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and
want to express solidarity with another -- but they are not interested in the
detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he
writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
- What am I trying to say?
- What words will express it?
- What image or idiom will make it clearer?
- Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
- Could I put it more shortly?
- Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never us a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
And he will probably ask himself two more:
But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply
throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The
will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a
certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of
partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that
the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes
clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it
is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel,
expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever
color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be
found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches
of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all
alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of
speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating
the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny,
free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a
curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of
dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light
catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to
have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses
that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a
machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is
not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the
speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he
may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the
responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not
indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian
purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be
defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and
which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus
political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and
sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the
inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts
set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.
Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads
with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or
rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial,
or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps:
this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is
needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian
totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents
when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say
something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls
upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the
details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap
between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to
long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age
there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political
issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and
schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should
expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify
-- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the
last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage
can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know
better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very
convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be
desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to
bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at
one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I
have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this
morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The
author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and
here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not
only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political
structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself,
but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified
Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has
something new to say -- and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the
bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This
invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases ( lay the foundations, achieve a
radical transformation ) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard
against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who
deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely
reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development
by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone
or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail.
Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary
process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples
were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned , which were
killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown
metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest
themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un-
formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the
average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and,
in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor
points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps
it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete
words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which
must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the
scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing
to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one
makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having
what is called a "good prose style." On the other hand, it is not concerned with
fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it
even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it
does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning.
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other
way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.
When yo think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want
to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you
find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract
you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a
conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do
the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's
meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can
choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the
meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely
to mak on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or
mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and
vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or
a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think
the following rules will cover most cases:
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of
attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable.
One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write
the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this
article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely
language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing
thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract
words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of
political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle
against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to
recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of
language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at
the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst
follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when
you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties,
from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One
cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits,
and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some
worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting
pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into
the dustbin, where it belongs.
ご意見、ご質問等ございましたら、 <ernestotaju@yahoo.co.jp> へ。
