"Politics and the English Language" (1946) is one of George Orwell's most famous essays. He examines political writing (and writing in general) in English, diagnoses its serious faults, and suggests remedies. In particular, Orwell states his beliefs of what writers should do:


# 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.


In one of the most famous sections of the essay, Orwell quotes from the King James Bible, Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 9, verse 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.

He translates this verse into "modern" English like this:

: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.

Elsewhere in the essay, Orwell examined what he believed to be a close association between bad prose and inhumane ideology:

:Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

::While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

Orwell comments that:

:The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

See also

* Plain English
* Fowler's Modern English Usage
* Logorrhoea
* Pleonasm
* Newspeak

External links

* Original text:
** HTML version
** Complete essay with search option , which cites source as Horizon, April 1946

Category:Essays
Category:George Orwell
Category:1946 works