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.
I hope this proves true, there are many very annoying phrases I want to see die.
When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, 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 and sensations. Afterward 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.
Even without the context of Orwell's greater point, this seems good advice for writing generally.
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.
!!
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
Funny you should say that when that has been happening the past few years here in 2025 in the United States...
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
It makes so much sense that the West, that is Western Europe and the United States, are speaking insincerely at this point in time, mere months after such political windfall as winning World War II. The U.S. is (soon to be?) blowing up the Bikini Atoll with their atomic toys; It and England together are colonizing the region of Palestine under the name Israel both to be the good guys for the Jewish diaspora after the holocaust, but also to set up something of a political outpost in the Middle East where they know there's great petroleum potential. So few details are given in political writing at this point because there are precious few details that politicians want described.
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism.
! It's important that one read this with the right context in mind. I started this (in my defense, on the heels of another long annotation assignment for another class) without really acknowledging that it's from George Orwell, from 1946, and about specifically Political Writing and Prose. Some of my annotations here I'm sure reek of this lack of recognition. Nonetheless, this phrase in particular, which makes little sense when applied to writing as a whole, shows why all of his other arguments have value, because of their context.
Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Well of course then do these writers not ever use illustrative phrasing. It's all coming together.
They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
I think I see why you, Prof. Sadler are having us read this... This whole passage is just Orwell's time's version of "Beware of Generative AI", is it not? This is valuable.
like tea-leaves blocking a sink
A great example of what he's saying to do.
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.
Here, the point comes across much better than it did before.
euphonious
(I just reverse-engineered the naming convention of the instrument the Euphonium... Eu/phon/ium--literally just "The good sound -er") On another note. Where is the dividing line, Orwell? does the use of this word here not fall into the category of "Pretentious Diction" as you laid out before, given that it's a Greek based word?
It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.
Wow... yeah.
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels 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 does seem okay at first glance, but when you look at it closer, it really does feel like parody of the original passage. It's like the individual items have been summarized on their own, and then repackaged, which makes it feel like its missing context.
Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
I can't entirely believe you here... Is this just me being biased in thinking my use of the words must be right?
The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. 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. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.
I can't tell if it's an appeal to critical thought that's doing it for me here, or if it's actually truth...
The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
(Ironically, this paragraph's complexity is hard to understand...) I think author is straight up wrong here! It really does just sound like a classic case of Language Purity High-horsery here.
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 English.
I find I'm kind of disagreeing here... It's not unusual for a language to adopt words, and a lot of these have very specific meanings for which there aren't easy words for in English... This work certainly is opinionated.
and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining)
I have wondered for years what the term is for this... the "noun form" vs a "verb form" of an idea... It's "gerund"? That's what the "noun form" is called?
Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject 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. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. 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-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render.
I'm pleased to see that this is actually some meaningful discussion of iffy wording in writing, instead of just more slander on "mumbo jumbo gen Z teen internet lingo slang" like I've heard a thousand times. Meaningful conversation about that can be had--if it gets into any depth, and if it avoids pathologizing or moralizing the behavior (because as many like to ignore, this kind of writing and its spread are just an example of a unique culture). Anyway though, I'll drop the side-subject now. What is being discussed here isn't uninteresting, and it could really improve my writing.
This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing
I do see now how these fit this description...
traduced
I see most of these are just verbose to the point of confusion, but I have to say this word made me laugh out loud. So obscure...
On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. 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. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
...Okay I can't find the flaw. I can feel it certainly, it's so wordy I can hardly follow, but... I don't know---this isn't the example of "Bad Writing" I'd have expected to find in an English class...
They are a little below the average
Average what...
If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
While I've not read the whole passage yet, I really do wonder what exactly is being talked about here. Does writing in lowercase in casual communication really destroy much of anything? Depending on context, I speak and write in many different ways, some of which involve a lot of swear words, slang, "poor" punctuation, and unnecessary abbreviations. However, from what I can see, none of these different code switches seems to detract from any others. They're merely forms of expression. Again, what is being called "bad habit" here? I hope, out of everything, that it's the habit of leaving things unexamined...
Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
This is very apt. In so many contexts, people describe the old as worse, the new as having progressed. While that's true in the sense of time progressing, it is not true that conditions unilaterally improve over time! Progress takes conscious work! Without continued maintenance (including education of history), differing ideas on things very often will lead to things backsliding.
My students teli me about an iirportant new skill: it involves maintaining eyecontact with someone while you text ro*.o.r" else
Very very unfortunately, tech has evolved in such torturous ways as to have me trying to make eye contact with a professor as I check my phone under the table for the necessary log-in code to pull up my note-taking software on my laptop. Dear lord, I just want to take notes! (I guess typing in a username and password just doesn't cut it these days---now we need both of those, an entire additional device, a cup of sugar and a forklift certification to even log into something anymore...)
weoften don't have time to talk to one uno,h"'about what really matters
This hits close to home. At work and at school, it feels like there's no time at all to bring up anything that isn't work or school. But feels just as overly-forward to ask anybody to hang out elsewhere--people seem almost offended at the ask, and nonetheless everyone seems like they have no time or energy to even spend time together these days.
The opposite is true' If we areunable to be alone, we are far more fk"iy to be lonely'
In other words, the less time we spend alone, the less prepared we will be to deal with loneliness. It can be comforting to turn on a comedy podcast as I walk to my car, but I can feel the difference in spiritual health when I look and listen to the world around me as I walk instead.
"I want to have a feeling; I need to send atext."
I kind of disagree with this paragraph--at least in 2025, it seems to me that internet spaces are more about receiving than giving. I personally only seem to text when I find I do have something to say, or a connection I want to tend to, rather than texting others simply because I'm bored.
social media continually asks us what's "on oul mind,"
I wonder what this means... I don't find that social media asks for your opinion very often, more that it just... throws things at you to absorb.
hey do not substitute for conversation'
This is very true. I have some online friends who I play D&D with, and we use "voice calls" during play, allowing all of six of us to speak and listen to each other in near-real time. Sending texts with them is much inferior, feeling stilted and less comfortable. However, these voice calls can't themselves compare to the experience of playing in person, everyone around the table, using body language.
Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be' This means we canedit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh' the face' the body'Not too much, not too liule -- just right
It's interesting that this sentiment is regarded as something unique to digital interaction. I would think that many people want to look right, speak right, act right, and curse under their breath when they flub the wording of a witty quip. Maybe though, it's that this attitude about oneself is more common these days since online, we Can literally change what we said, feeding that anxious instinct.