To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech or with the setting-up of a 'standard English' which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called 'a good prose style'. On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meanings as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose - not simply accept - the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase - some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse - into the dustbin where it belongs.
1946
1 This poem first appeared in the Adelphi, December 1936.
1 Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical By T. A. Jackson, 1937.
1 The History of the Fairchild Family by Mary M. Sherwood, 3 parts, 1818-47.
1 Hard Times was published as a serial in Household Words and Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in All the Year Round. Forster says that the shortness of the weekly instalments made it 'much more difficult to get sufficient interest into each'. Dickens himself complained of the lack of 'elbow-room'. In other words, he had to stick more closely to the story. [Author's footnote.]
1 Dickens turned Miss Mowcher into a sort of heroine because the real woman whom he had caricatured had read the earlier chapters and was bitterly hurt. He had previously meant her to play a villainous part. But any action by such a character would seem incongruous. [Author's footnote.]
1 Messrs John Player & Sons issued two series of cigarette cards entitled 'Characters from Dickens' in 1913; they reissued them as a single series in 1923.
2 Frank Fairleigh by F. E. Smedley, 1850; The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green by Cuthbert Bede (pseud. of Edward Bradley), 1853; Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures by Douglas Jerrold (reprinted from Punch, 1846).
1 From a letter to his youngest son (in 1868): 'You will remember that you have never at home been harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with such things, before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them. You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but heartily respect it... Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it.' [Author's footnote.]
1 This is quite incorrect. These stories have been written throughout the whole period by 'Frank Richards' and 'Martin Clifford', who are one and the same person! See articles in Horizon, May 1940, and Summer Pie, summer 1944. [Author's footnote 1945.]
1 There are several corresponding girls' papers. The Schoolgirl is companion-paper to the Magnet and has stories by 'Hilda Richards'. The characters are interchangeable to some extent. Bessie Bunter, Billy Bunter's sister, figures in the Schoolgirl. [Author's footnote.]
1 This was written some months before the outbreak of war. Up to the end of September 1939 no mention of the war has appeared in either paper. [Author's footnote.]
1 On 21 August 1939 Ribbentrop was invited to Moscow and on 23 August he and Molotov signed the Russo-German Pact.
1 Homage to Catalonia.
1 The Moscow Dynamos, a Russian football team, toured Britain in the autumn of 1945 playing against leading British clubs.
1 The Lear Omnibus edited by R. L. Megroz.
1 It is fair to say that the PEN Club celebrations, which lasted a week or more, did not always stick at quite the same level. I happened to strike a bad day. But an examination of the speeches (printed under the title Freedom of Expression) shows that almost nobody in our own day is able to speak out as roundly in favour of intellectual liberty as Milton could do three hundred years ago - and this in spite of the fact that Milton was writing in a period of civil war. [Author's footnote.]
2 Ministry of Information
1 The Cleft Chin Murder by R. Alwyn Raymond.
1 The V1, an unmanned aircraft developed by the Germans and used by them to bomb London from June 1944: they were nicknamed 'doodlebugs' by the Londoners.
2 The V2, a rocket bomb used by the Germans on London from September 1944.
1 Houyhnhnms too old to walk are described as being carried in 'sledges' or in 'a kind of vehicle, drawn like a sledge'. Presumably these had no wheels. [Author's footnote.]
1 The physical decadence which Swift claims to have observed may have been a reality at that date. He attributes it to syphilis, which was a new disease in Europe and may h
ave been more virulent than it is now. Distilled liquors, also, were a novelty in the seventeenth century and must have led at first to a great increase in drunkenness. [Author's footnote.]
1 Tower. [Author's footnote.]
1 At the end of the book, as typical specimens of human folly and viciousness, Swift names 'a Lawyer, a Pickpocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a Politician, a Whore-master, a Physician, an Evidence, a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traitor, or the like'. One sees here the irresponsible violence of the powerless. The list lumps together those who break the conventional code, and those who keep it. For instance, if you automatically condemn a colonel, as such, on what grounds do you condemn a traitor? Or again, if you want to suppress pickpockets, you must have laws, which means that you must have lawyers. But the whole closing passage, in which the hatred is so authentic, and the reason given for it so inadequate, is somehow unconvincing. One has the feeling that personal animosity is at work. [Author's footnote.]
1 The Story of my Experiments with Truth by M. K. Gandhi, translated from the Gujarati by Mahadev Desai.
1 An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific. [Author's footnote.]
1 Example: 'Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whit-manesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bullseyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation. (Poetry Quarterly.) [Author's footnote.]
1 One can cure onself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence. A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field. [Author's footnote.]
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The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1
first published by Martin Secker & Warburg 1968
Published in Penguin Books 1968
Copyright (c) the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1945, 1952, 1953, 1968
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 2
first published by Martin Secker & Warburg 1968
Published in Penguin Books 1970
Copyright (c) the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1958
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 3
first published by Martin Secker & Warburg 1968
Published in Penguin Books 1970
Copyright (c) the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1968
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 4
first published by Martin Secker & Warburg 1968
Published in Penguin Books 1970
Copyright (c) the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1968
This collection first published 2003
Published in Penguin Classics with an Introduction 2009
This collection copyright (c) the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 2003
Introduction copyright (c) Jeremy Paxman, 2009
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ISBN: 978-0-14-191228-8
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
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