Posted November 30, 2006

Let’s say I write a passage like this:

Medical practitioners indicate that the most effective change catalyst for a proactive weight reduction methodology is to downsize average daily caloric intake.

Instead of this:

Doctors say the best way to lose weight is to eat less.

What would George Orwell say?

He wouldn’t be happy about it at all.

More than 60 years ago Orwell wrote an essay called “Politics and the English Language.” While parts of his essay focused on political writing, most of his ideas are far more universal.

According to Orwell, poor writing lacks precision (“staleness of imagery”) and demonstrates an “indifference as to whether the words means anything at all.”

He categorizes some of these bad habits as follows:

1) Dying metaphors

“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."

Orwell’s examples from 1946 include: toe the line, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, Achilles’ heel, swan song, and hotbed.

Today we have such gems as slippery slope, think outside the box, at the end of the day, cash cow, raising the bar, best of breed, and state-of-the-art.

2) Awkward construction

“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 formations ... 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."

The “ize” construction is still with us. Virtually anything can be “ized,” giving us words such as prioritize, agendize, operationalize, bulletize, and even bucketize.

The “anticlimax” that irks Orwell so much annoys me, too. My theory is that some writers think adding more words adds a more intellectual tone. That’s why I often see awkward phrases such as due to the fact that and until such time as when words such as because or until would work just fine.

3) Pretentious diction

“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."

He’s right. English was once the language of "barbarians," certainly not appropriate if you wanted to impress others. Latin was the intellectual language used by the "civilized" people of the day. In polite company, for example, you’d refer to defecation instead of ... well, that other word.

Since then, we’ve borrowed many Latin words that have been folded into our vocabulary. But when you emphasize those Latin words, your tone becomes less approachable. Often those simple Anglo-Saxon words such as true, build, and eat work better than their "high-falutin'" Latin cousins such as accurate, construct, and consume.

From the Bible to Modern English

One of the best passages from Orwell’s essay is his parody of “Modern English” using this biblical quote (Ecclesiastes 9:11):

“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 Orwell’s 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."

Orwell’s analysis of these two passages sums up the difference quite clearly:

“The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 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 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first."

Curable?

Near the end of his essay, Orwell observes:

“I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable."

I’m not so sure, George. Much of your legacy lives on in phrases such as Big Brother, Thought Police, and even in your name – Orwellian.

I doubt you’d be happy about that. But don’t worry, there’s hope. I’m sure we can expect to prioritize a best-of-breed paradigm, operationalizing a sea change of the linguistic infrastructure in no time. (Oh, I’m sorry, I meant “in Internet time.")