Essay on psychology in Politics (New York). 2. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. 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. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. 4. Broader topics, on the other hand, cover connections between politics and other institutions like the church, religion, history, philosophy, etc. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. Ultimately, Orwell claims, bad writing results from corrupt thinking, and often attempts to make palatable corrupt acts: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” His examples of colonialism, forced deportations, and bombing campaigns find ready analogues in our own time. 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. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip—alien for akin—making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Harold Laski 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. 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. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an aire of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. 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. Learn about upcoming events and get the latest news from the federal plain language community. 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. Political Party: An organization that seeks to achieve political power by electing its members to public office. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. And he will probably ask himself two more: Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly. The article discusses various stories, persons, locations, rising-issues, and technical developments When these images clash—as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot—it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. Writing is a medium of human communication that involves the representation of a language with symbols. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: “[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.” You see, he “feels impelled” to write—feels, presumably, that he has something new to say—and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. All the “best people” from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. It is a piece of writing made as a way to practice in interpreting specific political theories. Political essay topics. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. Once a branch of philosophy, political science nowadays is typically considered a social science. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. 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. What image or idiom will make it clearer? When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. daily newspapers) or of a specific topic (i.e. Christina Katz offers a six-step process for writing a good explainer. Only time will tell whether your story will have this lasting impact, but this much is certain: writing political fiction is fun and cleansing. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality. 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. Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. 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. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. Writing systems are not themselves human languages (with the debatable exception of computer languages); they are means of rendering a language into a form that can be reconstructed by other humans separated by time and/or space. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain. Therefore, in the event that there is a proposal that reduces the revenues earned by such a government, but in return benefits the community, it is only fair that the government supports the proposal. 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