Orwell

I've started reading for my English course (Fiction, Film and Power) with George Orwell.  We've been asked to read Chapter 1 of 1984 and Politics and the English Language.

I'm a great admirer of the former.  I read it first at school (of course) and have read it several times since.  I think I'm more impressed with it each time I read it.  The first sentence retains its power to unsettle the reader as much now as it ever did:  "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

I'm underwhelmed by PatEL.  It's praised in many quarters as a key text on style and an examination of the ways in which language is debased and deformed to serve ideological and political purposes.  Beyond Orwell's observations about sloppy and unimaginative writing (he sets up some tired, over-used metaphors as 'Aunt Sallys' to be too easily knocked over) I react against the essay's innate conservatism and elitism.  It has the feel of a Little Englander howl against the way English usage and writing are going to Hell in a handcart.  A telling phrase used by Orwell is "the defence of the English language ..." as if it were an artefact or a building, a fine old church perhaps, threatened by the ruinous consequences of both the old (Greek and Latin words get a pasting from Orwell) and the new.  His constant refrain urging the deployment of Saxon words is rather too particular for my taste.  He doesn't quite assert that it's all the fault of William, the French and 1066 but his 'defence' is too narrowly focussed to stand up in his own day, let alone now.

Besides, history has shown him to be wrong.  Of course one can identify all kinds of bad writing, lacking in clarity, meaning and purpose.  But the language thrives, renews itself and good writing is all around.

I'll give him this though.  His rules of writing have merit even if his broader argument is riddled with holes.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

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