Politics and the English Language

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ACHILLES' HEEL†

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Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: CLASS, TOTALITARIAN, SCIENCE, PROGRESSIVE, REACTIONARY BOURGEOIS, EQUALITY.†

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Comfort's catholicity of perception and image ... continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness...

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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.†

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(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.†

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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.†

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But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.†

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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.†

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] 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.†

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Statements like MARSHAL PÉTAIN 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.†

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] 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.†

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This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing–no one capable of using phrases like "objective consideration of contemporary phenomena"–would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way.†

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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.

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A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say?†

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The words DEMOCRACY, SOCIALISM, FREEDOM, PATRIOTIC, REALISTIC, JUSTICE, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.†

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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.†

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Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.†

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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.†