![]() ![]() Political rhetoric now as in Orwell's day exploits not only euphemism ("austerity") but dysphemism ("skivers") and loaded metaphor ("fiscal cliff"): in our time, weaponised soundbites are deliberately engineered to smuggle the greatest amount of persuasion into the smallest space, to be virally replicated on rolling news. Should we just assume that everything politicians say is hot air? To do so would be to let our guards down. What is worrying, however, is that Orwell's diagnosis of "cloudy vagueness" and "pure wind" might seem to sanction an impatient dismissal. But he offers other bloodily fine examples from his era: "pacification" of villages by bombing, or "rectification of frontiers" by forcibly ejecting people from their farms. (Confucius had complained millennia before that politically motivated misnaming led to the corruption of society.) Orwell nods here by using the phrase "the Russian purges" descriptively himself: euphemising the show trials and mass executions as "purges" was a way of metaphorically justifying them as a purification of the body politic. This is put with exhilarating ferocity, though Orwell was not, as some assume, the first to notice the phenomenon. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." In the essay's peroration, he concludes: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." "Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible," Orwell writes, in the most celebrated passage. But both these aspects of the essay are problematic. (Aspiring writers love to collect lists of writing tips instead of actually writing.) Second, it is savagely contemptuous of politicians and what they say, an attitude that never goes out of fashion. But the enduring popularity of "Politics and the English Language" in particular derives from two things. So why do so many people still genuflect in its direction? Media invocations of Orwell's virtues increased markedly after 9/11, when it seemed to some opportunist intellectuals as though his life and oeuvre prophetically justified the pre-emptive invasion of far-off sandy places. Much of it is the kind of nonsense screed against linguistic pet hates that anyone today might compose in a green-text email to the newspapers. "Politics" is Orwell's most famous shorter work, and probably the most wildly overrated of any of his writings. GEORGE ORWELL POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE SERIESThis year also marks the more pleasantly round number of 110 years since his birth (on 25 June), so there is a Radio 4 series about him forthcoming, and Penguin are reissuing his works, including a standalone edition of "Politics and the English Language". ![]() On Monday it is "Orwell Day", the 63rd anniversary of his death. ![]() I t's a melancholy fate for any writer to become an eponym for all that he despised, but that is what happened to George Orwell, whose memory is routinely abused in unthinking uses of the adjective "Orwellian". ![]()
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