by Sanford Pinsker
Insight on the News, 21 Oct 1996
All issues are political issues," George Orwell declared with the same no-nonsense clarity he brought to nearly every sentence he crafted during a long career at the writing desk. And with this large generalization on the table, he went on to make clear just how debased most political writing had become: "Politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia." The complexities of modern life -- and especially its political dimensions -- coursed through Orwell's veins as they did through few others; and possibly no other figure wrote about the defining, titanic struggles between democracy and totalitarianism with such passion, uncompromising honesty and diamond-hard clarity. I have been quoting from his justly famous essay, "Politics and the English Language," partly because it first appeared 50 years ago and partly because what he had to say then may be even more crucial now.
By 1946, Orwell had completed Animal Farm and was hard at work on 1984, novels that would ensure his wide public reputation. He had had a bellyful of the worst that willful obfuscation could offer and set about cataloguing the sins that struck him as crimes against precise language and clear thought.
At its most benign, he felt political rhetoric generates fog rather than light; at its worst, it produces the Newspeak that 1984 held up for scathing criticism: War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength; and perhaps scariest of all, that 2+2 turns out to be any number the government says it is.
Small wonder, then, that Orwell's essay insisted that political speech and writing amounted to "the defense of the indefensible." Constructions such as the "transfer of populations" or the "elimination of unreliable elements" are what politicians say when what they really mean is: "I believe in killing my opponents when I can get good results by doing so." Hitler and Stalin clearly were examples of this inclination brought to a rapid boil, but they hardly are the only instances. Politicians quickly learn the art of covering their tracks with verbal grease.
By contrast, Orwell's essay championed the cause of writing committed to plain sense, a process he described as "picking words for their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clear." The rub, of course, is that one must have a clear idea in mind before setting pen to paper, and this is precisely the point Orwell meant to drive home in his essay The problems that befall the English language are not to be found in the pernicious influence of this or that writer but, rather, in the insidious way that "an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form." To explain how the process operates, Orwell uses the analogy of the drunkard: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks." Much the same applies to what Orwell felt was 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."
One need not be a card-carrying pessimist to recognize that the problem Orwell identified a half-century ago only has worsened. Now fuzzy thinking is wedded to imprecise language at a number of altars and the difficulty of knowing with some degree of certainty when someone is speaking rot is more difficult than ever. We are inundated by all sorts of shoddy speech, from the bromides of advertisements to the banalities of political rhetoric. Indeed, on some afternoons I would be willing to settle for old-fashioned "double talk," so convoluted and dizzying have some contemporary coinages become. During the Gulf War, for example, American readers were treated to giddy accounts of "smart bombs" and straight-faced briefings about "collateral damage," but never to a spokesperson who said: "Oops! We aimed at a military installation but hit the hospital next door, killing 200 innocent civilians." And I surely am not the only person who has wondered what a term such as "revenue enhancement" means -- that is, until the tax bill turns up in the mail slot.
Granted, many crimes against the purity of language seem innocuous enough, more an occasion for laughter than despair. President Eisenhower once described Alaska as "that virgin land into which the hand of man has not trod" and thus earned a dubious immortality as a textbook example of the mixed metaphor; and I still remember the student, deeply concerned about the pervasive apathy at our college, who wrote, "We've got to quit sitting around on our hands while the future slips through our fingers." I cite these howlers because language mavens often are written off as snobs who flinch whenever somebody begins a sentence with "Hopefully" or splits an infinitive. But what Orwell had in mind when he wrote "Politics and the English Language" is much more important. In much the same way that tiny droplets of water can erode a granite wall, each time we settle for jargon rather than plain-speaking precision or for cant as opposed to clear thought, we weaken the very strength and resilience of our language. And that, as Orwell pointed out, ultimately threatens democracy itself. For when words cease to have fixed meanings, when they become political prizes to be contested for and won by manipulation, tyranny has a nasty habit of rushing in to fill the vacuum. Then, fair is as good as foul, truth becomes indistinguishable from the big lie, and what 2 + 2 actually equals no longer matters.
