Or: Cherry-pick and you’ll let the
baby out with the bath-water
According to good old wiki:
"Politics and the English
Language" (1946) is an essay by George Orwell which criticises
the "ugly and inaccurate" written English of his time and
examines the connection between political orthodoxies and the
debasement of language. It was originally published in the April 1946
issue of the journal Horizon. [… He said that] unclear prose was a
"contagion" which had spread even to those who had no
intent to hide the truth, and it concealed a writer's thoughts from
himself and others. Orwell encourages concreteness and clarity
instead of vagueness, and individuality over political conformity.”
In fact, much of what he wrote will be
anathema to those in [general] linguistics, as I shall try to
demonstrate. I am going to start by listing his six principles, of
which I only agree with the last two. I shall then suggest what we
should really be looking at in language, which will be a slight
challenge not only to English scholars and stylists, but also
philosophers. Orwell urges:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile or
other figure of speech which you
are used to seeing in
print.
2. Never use 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.
Of course I agree with number six, and
I also agree with 5 with reservations, but there are serious
linguistic objections to the first four. I shall start with '4':
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Now English uses the passive more than
most European languages, and indeed Sanskrit does even more so, and
Maori even more than any of these. The linguistic reasons are
different in each case, but I shall only consider English: the basic
word-order of English is 'Subject-Verb-Object', which is also that of
most European languages. But more fundamental to that is the order
'Old information – New information'.
Now unlike Latin and Russian, which
have a case system, we must distinguish subject and object by
word-order. So when the object is old information and the subject is
new information, we turn it into the passive voice:
My friend
was bitten by a sheep.
We also use the last position or
near-last position to indicate emphasis. So my advice is, trust your
intuitions, and if you prefer the passive voice… let it be used!
For Orwell’s third point: If it is possible to cut a word out,
always cut it out.
A la Thatcher, I say, no! no! no! When
you put in the extra words, you are often putting in words which you
would put in for the spoken word. Now such words have two functions:
Bearers of intonation: intonation, and
often ‘tones of voice’, is quite systematic, and are a key part
of an utterance. If you remove words, you muck up the intonational
flow. Maybe this is an Orwellian barbarity, but it needs to be spelt
out.
Redundancy: apparently we only take in
a third of what we hear, and our minds fill in with what we assume is
said. Our sub-conscious minds work much more quickly than our
conscious minds, so this is a more efficient and less stressful way
of proceeding: we are less able to do this with subjects we have no
interest in, and so this becomes more tiring: and who hasn’t had
that experience. So redundancy is a key way of making sure your
listener or reader gets the message.
But here I must consider Orwell’s
aversion to ‘not un-‘. His example is ‘not unjustifiable’.
He tries to discredit the use of this expression with the footnote
example:
A not un-black dog was chasing the not
un-small rabbit across the not un-green field.
But you can only
use un- with certain types of adjectives – mainly value - and you
would not normally use un- with colour adjectives except for effect,
such as irony. Many but not all linguistics are aware of this due to
the work of R.M.W. Dixon who wrote well after Orwell’s time.
Does Orwell have an aversion to the
word nonnulli in Latin, meaning some, but literally meaning ‘not
none’. No, good old not- un is a perfectly normal expression
meaning ‘to a degree’, and missing it out makes an adjective such
as ‘justifiable’ more forceful than intended. Not unforceful
indeed.
But I would like to look at another
flawed criticism. He says: '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.' For a start, 'in my opinion' and 'I
think' mean the same, so the redundant passage becomes ''it is not an
unjustifiable assumption that”. Now apart from anything else, this
is not the same as “it is a justifiable assumption that ”: this
is a matter of degree. But far more serious is that an assumption is
not the same thing as an opinion, so the speaker or writer is saying
something more specific than 'I think'. This to my mind is quite a
serious misjudgement. Now the second maxim:
Never use a long word where a short
one will do.
The same principles apply, bearers of
intonation and redundancy, but also: no two words have exactly the
same meanings, connotations and associations. Perhaps Orwell meant
that a distortion of meaning is a barbarity, but I shall come back to
this later. But last but not least, of these four:
Never use a metaphor, simile or other
figure of speech which you
are used to seeing in
print.
Let us start with mixed metaphors: in
the text he says about mixed metaphors:
“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.”
Really? I think the writer is indeed
thinking, and that a degree of irony is being shown that Orwell has
not spotted. I love mixed metaphors, and when you have someone like
Orwell cherry-picking at English style, there is a serious danger of
letting the baby out of the bath-water. Some phrases he dislikes:
standing shoulder to shoulder, play into the hands of, hotbed,
melting pot, etc etc
Really? I think these are excellent
metaphors. I stand shoulder to shoulder with them as a hotbed of
humour that I assume Orwell fails to see. Use them as and when –
not like Marmite of course, but as and when. The last thing I want to
say is two-fold:
(a) The written word is always briefer
than the spoken word, which uses more redundancy: do not cut it down
to mutilate the intonation it goes with.
(b) Don't use technical and other
phraseology to people for whom it is not natural or comprehensible.
Do use it where it is a sort of lingua franca. This I think is the
appropriate answer to maxim 5?
Martin Prior
References
Orwell, George (1946) Politics and
the English Language. In: Horizon, London(GB), April 1946, and
often republished.
Dixon, R.M.W. (1982) Where have All the
Adjectives Gone?: And Other Essays in Semantics and Syntax. Janua
Linguarum. Series Maior 107. Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton
Publishers.
The Philosophy Takeaway Newsletter 59
