On Politics and the English Language

George Orwell's 1946 essay Politics and the English Language is the shortest entry in this library's media cluster and one of the most useful things a citizen can read, because it teaches a skill rather than just an argument: how to detect the corruption of language that serves the corruption of politics. Orwell's claim is that sloppy, vague, cliched language and dishonest politics feed each other, that the decline of language makes it easier to think foolishly and to deceive, and that clear writing is therefore a kind of political resistance.

His central insight is that bad language is not merely careless but often deliberately useful. Political speech and writing, he observed, are largely the defense of the indefensible, and so they rely on euphemism, vagueness, and prefabricated phrases precisely because plain words would make the underlying reality unacceptable. Atrocities are described in bloodless abstractions; brutal policies are wrapped in soothing or meaningless jargon; stale metaphors and ready-made phrases let a writer or speaker avoid thinking, and let a listener avoid noticing what is actually being said. Language becomes, in his phrase, an instrument for concealing or preventing thought rather than expressing it.

The essay is famous partly for its practical rules, the concrete advice to prefer short words to long, to cut every word that can be cut, to never use a stale metaphor or a piece of jargon where a plain word will do, to break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. But the rules serve a larger purpose. Orwell is teaching the reader to write clearly so as to think clearly, and to read critically so as to catch the moment when language is being used to slip something past them. A citizen armed with Orwell's suspicion of cant is harder to manipulate.

This makes the essay a permanent civic tool. Every era produces its own euphemisms for things that could not survive plain description, its own fog of jargon and slogan designed to dull the public's attention. Orwell gave us the habit of stripping that language down to ask what it really means, and what it is hiding. The skill does not age, only its targets change.

The essay belongs in this library beside Orwell's fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, also on these shelves, where he dramatized the same concerns about language and power, and beside the other works on propaganda and public opinion. Politics and the English Language is in copyright and widely available in print and in many anthologies. It is short enough to read in twenty minutes and worth rereading often. Read it to learn how to hear what political language is actually saying, and what it is trying not to say.