A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that
he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying
to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself
two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably
ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by
simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding
in. 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. It is at this point
that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language
becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where
it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel,
expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy,
of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political
dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers
and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party,
but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid,
homemade turn of speech. 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. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker
who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself
into a machine. 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.
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. And this reduced state of consciousness, if
not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
