Sub Terra Vita Chronicle #16: Part II—Language, Clarity and Thought: Orwell and Political Speech

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

September 4, 2015

Chronicle #16: Part II—Language, Clarity and Thought: Orwell and Political Speech

(Continued from Chronicle #15)

Language has always had an anarchy around it. It grows by mean use. In poetry, language flowers its abundant meaning, like a garden harvested of fruitful images from the seeds of insights sewn in spring. In prose writing, language follows rules, rigid but evolving, to convey thoughts. In language of any kind, opportunities abound for wit, or contempt, and all between, and even irony used as bludgeon. Language must have the one thing needed for civilization to start and endure, to grow and develop: Language needs clarity in the communication.

In the essay under discussion, “Politics and the English Language,”¹ George Orwell may have provided both the lock and the key to our future. Orwell surrendered that English-speaking “ civilization is decadent, and our language so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse.” (p. 954). Furthermore, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” (964). Although he meant primarily British English, it applies as well to the United States and American English. Yet, these two quotations carry with them the weight of the past dreading the future, and of what may come from people using lazy forms of words in any language, all filled with jargon, acronyms, misunderstood or wrong contexts, wrongly used foreign diction, slack rules of punctuation, and pretensions of words used without understanding the meaning.

The essay speaks to any of the points in time since written in 1946, and speaks to how Orwell feared language would bring the state and practice of politics, here and now, to the debased sense of mass public illiteracy concerning the issues. Orwell, perhaps, though visionary, had no concept of how the tools and leaps of technology would allow the laziest of communications that we see today, in the instant messaging, texting (with character limits), and the “liked” photos of any modern “Potemkin” emoticons. Again, Orwell: “By using stale metaphors, similes, and idiom, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.” (p. 961).

In politics, Orwell says, “[W]ords used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarianism, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.” (p.959-60). This statement should give every reader a thoughtful pause.

“The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness,” Orwell said (p.960). Indeed, in our communications everyday, sent or received, do we understand the details, the context, see the precision? How do we evaluate what we see and hear from and about political candidates, especially the presidential candidates?

To switch the focus, when putting in hard, patient work, and frustratingly long periods of time learning to write, American writer Ernest Hemingway set out to do what seemed possible, but very hard. He wanted to write just one true sentence. And here we set the challenge. This week, can all of us text, blog, speak, journal, or just plain write on paper, at least ONE True sentence?

Doing the challenge might assist us in the ultimate aim Orwell set forth in the introductory paragraphs of “Politics and the English Language.” He says, “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation, and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think more clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration. (p. 954-5).” As in all things, it depends on each of us first. Write one true sentence, and build the future from there.

1George Orwell: Essays. Selected and Introduced by John Cary. Everyman's Library. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.