George Worwell

Politics and the English Language
by George Orwell
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 againstthe 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 badinfluence 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 becomesugly 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 thinkmore 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 asit 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:
1. I amnot, 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)
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with anative 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 )
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
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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)
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...