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:

        1.  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 )

        2.  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 )

        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 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 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

        5.  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:

    1.What am I trying to say?
    2.What words will express it?
    3.What image or idiom will make it clearer?
    4.Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

    1.Could I put it more shortly?
    2.Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

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:

    1.  Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
    2.  Never us a long word where a short one will do.
    3.  If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
    4.  Never use the passive where you can use the active.
    5.  Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an
       everyday English equivalent.
    6.  Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

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.

1946
 
 
 
 
 

*AP* and Advanced Placement Program* are registered trademarks of the College Entrance Examination Board, which was not involved in the  production of, and does not endorse this site.*