Orwell on Language

As part of my revisiting of Orwell's work, I recently re-read his essay Politics and the English Language, written in 1946, toward the end of his life.

For Orwell, clear language is a prerequisite for clear thought, just as muddled language is the foundation for muddled thought. Language and thought can be either a virtuous or vicious cycle.

He describes this as follows:

A man may take a 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 may make it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

A particularly pernicious form of language abuse is the use of vague and wordy phrases to mask imprecise thought and mindless conformity. Orwell's example is both hilarious and telling -- translating a passage from Ecclesiastes into a bureaucratise that most of us are all too sadly familiar with. Thus

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, nore yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to all.

becomes

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.

I wrote earlier about how this sort of expression deadens the appeal of progressive or socialist ideas. The same worn and tired phrases may sooth the base, but do little to either attract new blood or bring forth fresh ideas. Again, Orwell's argument from a half century ago seems even more relevant today

Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, 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 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 . . ..

I long ago lost track of the time I have spent listening to the type of speech Orwell describes. Far from attracting, it repels. Canada desperately needs a left that can speak clearly, express new ideas and draw people to a common cause -- not mouth the obvious in an impenetrable way.