Swindles & Perversions

The English language has come to a sad state, decided London literary critic George Orwell (Dickens, Dali and Others; Animal Farm). In the current New Republic,* he tells what is wrong.

Writes Orwell: "The English language . . . becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. . . . 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.

"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. . . . 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. . . . Modern writing at its worst . . . consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else. . . ."

Orwell wonders how a 20th Century master of these "swindles and perversions" might have written this passage in 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.

A modern "swindler," says Orwell, would probably turn it out like this:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Politicians and pamphleteers, says Orwell, let their words "fall upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Specifically, Orwell would do away with such "dying metaphors" as toe the line, ride roughshod over, play into the hands of, stand shoulder to shoulder with, such "verbal false limbs" as make contact with, play a leading role in, serve the purpose of, and such "pretentious diction" as phenomenon, constitute, epochmaking, unforgettable, ancien regime, status quo. And he would clearly define or do without such "meaningless words" as realistic, sentimental, fascism, democracy, progressive, reactionary.

* Reprinted from England's Horizon.

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