Politics and the English Language
Based on Wikipedia: Politics and the English Language
The Ink of the Cuttlefish
When a writer is being dishonest, George Orwell once observed, they instinctively reach for long words and exhausted phrases—"like a cuttlefish spurting out ink." That single image, from his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," captures something we all recognize but rarely articulate: the way murky language and murky thinking feed on each other, creating a fog that serves those who would rather not be understood.
The essay remains one of the most widely taught pieces of writing about writing. It has been reprinted in over a hundred college textbooks. Its six rules for clear prose have become almost proverbial. And yet Orwell himself admitted that if you looked through his essay carefully, you would find him committing the very faults he protested against.
This is not hypocrisy. It is honesty about how difficult clarity actually is.
The Machinery of Euphemism
Orwell's central argument is deceptively simple: bad writing and bad politics are connected. When you want to defend something indefensible, you cannot speak plainly. You must reach for abstractions, euphemisms, and prefabricated phrases that slide past the mind without creating pictures.
Consider his examples. Villages bombed from the air, inhabitants driven into the countryside, cattle machine-gunned, huts set ablaze—this, he notes, is called "pacification." Millions of farmers stripped of their land and forced to march with only what they can carry—this becomes "transfer of population" or "rectification of frontiers." People imprisoned without trial, shot in the back of the neck, or worked to death in Arctic labor camps—this is termed "elimination of unreliable elements."
The purpose of such language is not communication. It is concealment.
"Such phraseology is needed," Orwell wrote, "if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them." The abstract word insulates the mind from the concrete reality. You can discuss "pacification" at a dinner party. You cannot so easily discuss burning villages while your guests eat their soup.
A Contagion of Unclear Thought
Here is where Orwell's analysis grows more interesting. He was not merely criticizing propaganda. He was describing a kind of intellectual disease that spreads from liars to honest people, from politicians to ordinary writers who have no intention of deceiving anyone.
The mechanism works like this. Political language, because it must defend the indefensible, develops a style: vague, inflated, full of dying metaphors and ready-made phrases. This style then spreads through imitation. Writers absorb it unconsciously. They reach for familiar phrases not because they want to obscure the truth but because those phrases are simply lying around, convenient, requiring no effort.
Orwell compared this to alcoholism. A man may drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail more completely because he drinks. English, he argued, was caught in a similar spiral. "It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
This is the key insight. Language shapes thought as much as thought shapes language. When you write in prefabricated phrases, you are not expressing ideas—you are assembling them from a kit. The phrases do your thinking for you. And they think badly.
The Catalogue of Swindles
To illustrate his point, Orwell collected five passages from contemporary writers and dissected what was wrong with them. One had five negatives in fifty-three words. Another suffered from mixed metaphors. A third was, in his judgment, "simply meaningless." A fourth was "an accumulation of stale phrases." In the fifth, "words and meaning have parted company."
From these specimens, he identified four categories of bad writing.
Dying metaphors. These are figures of speech that were once vivid but have been used so often that they no longer create any image. Phrases like "toe the line," "ride roughshod over," "stand shoulder to shoulder with." Writers use them without knowing what they originally meant. Some have been so mangled that people get them wrong—writing "tow the line" instead of "toe the line," imagining a rope rather than a mark on the ground.
Verbal false limbs. These are the padded constructions that inflate simple statements into something that sounds more impressive. Instead of "break," you write "render inoperative." Instead of "now," you write "at this point in time." Instead of "I think," you write "it is my considered opinion that." The simple verb becomes a phrase. The phrase becomes a paragraph.
Pretentious diction. This is the use of fancy words—often Latin or Greek in origin—to give an air of scientific objectivity or cultural sophistication. Words like "phenomenon," "element," "objective," "categorical," "virtual." Orwell noted that foreign words like "cul de sac" or "ancien régime" were used to imply elegance. Scientific terms were borrowed to make political arguments sound like natural laws.
Meaningless words. These are terms so vague that they can mean almost anything the speaker wants. Orwell pointed especially to words used in art criticism and political discourse—"romantic," "values," "human," "democratic." He quoted a passage of literary criticism that was, he claimed, almost completely empty of meaning.
The Bible Test
Orwell had learned about good prose as a schoolboy at St. Cyprian's, a boarding school where the headmaster's wife, Cicely Vaughan Wilkes, taught English with a memorable technique. She would take a simple passage from the King James Bible and "translate" it into the worst kind of modern prose. The contrast made the point better than any lecture.
Orwell borrowed this technique for his essay. He took a famous passage 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.
Then he translated it into "modern English of the worst sort":
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.
The second version is longer. It has more syllables. But it contains no concrete images. There is no sun. There is no race. There is no battle. The swift and the strong have disappeared into "innate capacity." Time and chance have become "a considerable element of the unpredictable."
The Biblical version makes you see something. The modern version makes you see nothing at all.
Six Rules (With an Escape Clause)
Near the end of his essay, Orwell offered six rules for avoiding the worst habits of modern prose. They have been quoted so often that they have almost become clichés themselves—which Orwell would have appreciated.
First: never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. If a phrase comes to you too easily, it has probably come to thousands of other writers before you. It has lost its power to create a picture.
Second: never use a long word where a short one will do. This does not mean all long words are bad. It means you should not choose a long word simply because it sounds more impressive.
Third: if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Most first drafts contain words that add nothing. Removing them makes the prose sharper.
Fourth: never use the passive voice where you can use the active. "The ball was thrown by John" is weaker than "John threw the ball." The passive often conceals who is responsible for an action, which is precisely why politicians favor it.
Fifth: never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Specialist vocabulary has its place, but it should not be used to intimidate or exclude.
Sixth—and this is the crucial one—break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. Rules are guides, not chains. The point is clear communication, not mechanical obedience.
The Critics Strike Back
Orwell's essay has not gone unchallenged. Some critics have found it too simple. Others have found it self-contradicting.
The linguist Geoffrey Pullum, though an admirer of Orwell's fiction, called the essay "dishonest." He objected especially to what he saw as "its insane and unfollowable insistence that good writing must avoid all phrases and word uses that are familiar." How, Pullum asked, can you write anything if every familiar phrase is forbidden?
Others have pointed out that Orwell himself used the passive voice more often than most writers. One study found that passive constructions made up over twenty percent of his sentences in this very essay—higher than the thirteen percent average in the periodicals researchers examined. Orwell was, it seems, fonder of the passive than he admitted.
The literary critic Louis Menand raised a deeper objection. Orwell, he wrote, "makes it seem that the problem with fascism is, at bottom, a problem of style." But ugliness, Menand argued, has no necessary connection to evil. Anglo-Saxon words are not inherently more truthful than Latin ones. Beautiful prose can serve monstrous purposes, and clumsy prose can express genuine insight.
There is something to this criticism. Orwell's essay can make you feel that if only everyone wrote more clearly, political problems would somehow resolve themselves. That is a fantasy. Clear language is necessary for honest thought, but it is not sufficient.
The Shadow of Newspeak
When Orwell wrote "Politics and the English Language" in late 1945 and early 1946, he was already sick with the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. He was also thinking about the novel that would become Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The connection between the essay and the novel is direct. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian state of Oceania has developed Newspeak, a reduced version of English designed to make certain thoughts literally unthinkable. If you eliminate the words for freedom and rebellion, how can anyone conceive of freedom or rebellion?
Newspeak is, as the critic Michael Shelden observed, "the perfect language for a society of bad writers." It reduces choices. It provides ready-made phrases for every occasion. It does your thinking for you—and ensures that your thinking serves the Party.
The essay was a diagnosis. The novel was a prognosis: here is where this disease leads if we do not cure it.
Why It Matters Still
Orwell was writing in a specific moment. The Second World War had just ended. The Soviet Union was tightening its grip on Eastern Europe. The atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The language of politics was saturated with euphemisms for mass killing.
And yet the essay feels contemporary. We still live in a world where bombing campaigns are called "surgical strikes," where firing workers is called "rightsizing," where surveillance is called "data collection." The machinery of euphemism has not been dismantled. If anything, it has grown more sophisticated.
Orwell's insight remains valuable: when you catch yourself reaching for a familiar phrase, stop. Ask yourself what you actually mean. Try to see the concrete reality behind the abstraction. And be suspicious of any prose that slides too smoothly through your mind without creating pictures.
The goal is not to write like Orwell. It is to think clearly enough that your writing becomes your own.
The Man Behind the Essay
There is a biographical detail worth mentioning. When Orwell wrote this essay, his wife Eileen had been dead for less than a year. She had died unexpectedly during surgery in March 1945, leaving him alone with their adopted son. Despite his grief—or perhaps because of it—Orwell was working at a ferocious pace. In the year after Eileen's death, he produced some 130 pieces of writing.
He was also desperately ill. In February 1946, the month before the essay was published, he was seriously sick and longing to escape London for the remote Scottish island of Jura, where he hoped to write the novel that was taking shape in his mind.
"Politics and the English Language" was, in a sense, a farewell. It was his last major piece for the journal Horizon, which had published much of his best wartime writing. He was turning away from journalism toward fiction—toward the dark masterpiece that would appear in 1949, the year before his death.
The essay was originally intended for a different magazine, Contact, but was rejected. Horizon took it instead. Sometimes the best work finds its audience by accident.
A Packet of Aspirins
Orwell knew that clear writing was hard. He compared the temptation to use ready-made phrases to having "a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow." When you are tired, when you are uncertain, when the deadline is pressing, it is so much easier to reach for the familiar phrase than to think of the exact word.
He did not claim to be immune. He admitted his own failures. He knew that his rules, even if followed perfectly, could not guarantee good prose. "One could keep all of them," he wrote, "and still write bad English."
But he believed the effort was worth making. Not because good prose would save the world. But because clear thinking was "a necessary first step toward political regeneration." You cannot solve a problem you cannot name. You cannot resist a lie you cannot see through.
The cuttlefish spurts ink to escape. The honest writer does the opposite: cuts through the murk, makes the invisible visible, says what actually is.
That is the work. It is never finished. And it matters more than ever.