Orwell on stale language
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
Orwell's essay makes a claim about cause that runs both ways: language becomes ugly and inexact because our thoughts are careless, and the slovenliness of the language then makes careless thought easier. A writer who reaches for a phrase that is already assembled does not have to work out what they mean. The phrase does it for them, and to that extent thinks for them.
He sorts the ready-made material into kinds. Dying metaphors: images so worn that nobody pictures them, used because they save the effort of inventing one. Padding around the verb: a simple verb swapped for a phrase built on a general-purpose one, usually in the passive. Pretentious diction: the long borrowed word chosen to sound impartial or learned. Meaningless words: terms of approval or blame that no longer point at anything.
Against this he sets a writer who, for each sentence, asks what they are trying to say, what words will express it, what image will make it clearer, and whether the image is fresh enough to work. Then six short rules, the last of which tells you to break the other five sooner than write something ugly.
✨KEY IDEAS
A stock phrase saves you the trouble of thinking, and partly conceals your meaning even from yourself.
Stale metaphors are used without being seen, which is why they get mixed.
He rewrites a famous biblical verse in modern committee prose to show what is lost.
Prefer the short word, the active verb, the everyday term, and cut what can be cut.
He admits that he has probably committed the same faults in the essay itself.
📝READING NOTES
Paraphrase, not quotation. First read at university. Reread on 15 and 16 November because Zinsser kept pointing at it. The essay's examples come from the public arguments of 1946. I am keeping only what it says about sentences.
Reading it the week I read it
The promotion answer came on Friday the 14th. The feedback was kind, and it was written in a dialect I know well and partly speak. I am not going to copy any of it here. But I went through my own promotion case afterwards with Orwell's list beside me, and the worst offender in the file was me: a paragraph about driving alignment across stakeholders that I could not have drawn a picture of.
His four kinds, with my own examples
- Dead metaphor: low-hanging fruit, moving the needle. Nobody sees fruit.
- Verbal padding: make a determination regarding for decide.
- Pretentious diction: utilise, leverage as a verb, learnings.
- Words with nothing behind them: delight in a product spec. My oldest grievance, now with a citation.
Why it is more than a style guide
Because of the loop. Vague phrasing lets me avoid deciding, and having avoided deciding, I have only vague phrases. That is the same mechanism as 📖 Zinsser on clutter, and Orwell adds where the phrases come from: they arrive prefabricated, from the room I work in. The two notes together produced 💎 Clutter is a failure of thinking before it is a failure of style.
Objections
- His history is thin. He implies English was once clear and has decayed. Every generation has said so.
- The rules are too absolute and he breaks them, which he knows. The sixth rule is the honest one.
- Never use a foreign or technical word would end my job. Exception, kanban, confidence interval are terms of art and nothing shorter means the same. The test should be whether the reader shares the term.
- A fresh metaphor on every page would be exhausting. Some dead ones are simply words now.
Kept as
The axiom ⚓ Say the plain thing, written today: clarity as something owed to the reader, not a decoration. And one more line in the strategy of ♦️ Writing clearly.
Reading record
- Reading: Second reading. The first was at university.
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : Politics and the English Language, George Orwell, 1946
- Orwell argues that : careless language and careless thought feed each other, and that the cycle can be broken sentence by sentence
- by stating that : ready-made phrases, worn metaphors, padded verbs and inflated words let a writer avoid deciding what they mean, and that choosing each word and image deliberately restores the thinking