Reading Orwell's Politics and the English Language
some thoughts, plus, what's an annotated bibliography, anyway?
It’s amazing what you can accomplish when procrastinating. Tasks I’d moved steadily into the future in Asana over the past month were mysteriously tempting today, knowing as I did that I had to start on the drafts for a monthly freelance deadline AND send out my first annotated bibliography.
When I dreamed up the idea of these “postcards from the route” of my research, I wasn’t sure how they’d function in practice. Simply sharing quotes from the things I’ve read, listened to, or watched wouldn’t be enough. Equally, I didn’t want these to function like extensions of my Friday recommendations. Too much synthesis and I’d be treading on the toes of the weekly Wednesday essay. What I realized as I began writing was that the annotated bibliography thing doesn’t really work.
First post and already I am abandoning ship! The way I tend to synthesize what I read is to write my thoughts out in full sentences or one-word bullets. So, I am throwing out the concept and instead today reviewing an essay by a writing GOAT, George Orwell.
I am confident that in one writing workshop or another over the years, I’ve been handed an over-copied print out of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” an essay he published in the journal Horizon in 1946. (It’s available to read for free online at the Orwell Foundation.) I don’t have any memory of reading it, but perhaps I did drag a highlighter across the smudged-looking text. Then, this Christmas, a pamphlet-sized Penguin printed edition (which includes Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf, so, there’s that) was in my stocking, tucked in by Santa [aka, my husband]. I read it recently, shaking my head with frustration at times, surprised by the longevity of his advice at others.
Orwell opens the essay by critiquing passages in a variety of published texts, then lists the ways that writers write badly. I didn’t underline anything in this section. Probably, were I to have read this when it was published, I would have found the list novel, but now, avoiding meaningless words and pretentious diction is advice dispensed by any guide to writing.
The first thing I underlined was over halfway through the essay:
“In [example 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: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”
Good advice, though deeply subjective. For one: what is ugly to one is beautiful to another. I bolded the section most often quoted, but it’s the first sentence I was stuck on. I do agree that—mostly—words and meaning should not part company. But, sometimes writing is about subverting meaning or of play (meaning-making on a meta level). This made me think of how children’s books focus on the delight in sounds for their own sake, and how “meaning” is a construct that develops over time. Words are learned in constructions that one might later call nonsense, but that very nonsense is the route to meaning. (For more on this topic, read Anna Holmes’s excellent essay in the New Yorker about Goodnight Moon author Margaret Wise Brown.)
I don’t like Orwell’s prescriptivist lens on language in this essay, how he believes that language should be a certain way. I believe that language is a social construct that is constantly evolving and that—despite my at-times pedantic obsession with using pronouns (as in me and her went to the store rather than she and I…)—there is no one right way to use a language.
Orwell makes it clear that he thinks using words of non-Anglo Saxon origin (like Greek, Latin, and other foreign words) are pretentious and dishonest, saying “A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.” I agree with his subsequent sentence that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” though the fact that insincere derives from Latin does undermine his previous point.
It’s been nearly 80 years since Orwell published this essay, and some of it feels fresh as ever. Here’s what I’ll keep hold of for the future:
“Let the meaning choose the word.” If nonsense or play is the goal, then that is meaning enough.
One should dispense with “readymade phrases,” aka clichés like “lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation.”
“If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”
When I began reading “Politics and the English Language,” I was hoping for something more concrete about how language is used with regard to political speech, but in the end, I enjoyed engaging with a historical text, both for what it said about the time during which Orwell was writing as well as the obvious influence this piece had on future writers.