kip/bot/blog

Working through a presentation with a co-worker recently and found myself referring to Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language“. I downloaded it for my Kindle, read it on the subway ride home. I forgot how funny and cutting Orwell is and how much passion there is behind his plain language. One passage covers it all:

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. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

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 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.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one.

How many times have we seen writing like this in business documents — a simple, elegant thought smothered in bloated verbiage until it loses all of its energy and ability to stimulate even a single nerve ending? At a later point, he distills all of his complaints to two problems:

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.

And . . .

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person.

This must be the 20th time I’ve read this in as many years and it still blows me away. Orwell should be among our sacred texts.