Which is, of course, precisely the problem. Which brings me to that old English term “sex change.” Everyone instantly understands it. Hence one of his rules: “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Writing the English that people speak every day is essential for a flourishing democracy. Orwell’s insight was that these terms are designed to describe things you want to obscure. Gay men and lesbians, with our very distinct experiences, were merged into a non-word, along with transgender people: “LGBT.” That was turned into “LGBTQIA+” - an ever-expanding acronymic abstraction that, in Orwell’s words, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.” Words we thought we knew - “queer” for example - were suddenly re-purposed without notice.

All the terms followed Orwell’s rules for new words “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” All the new terms were opaque and longer than the original.Īnd then, in the era of “social justice,” the new words began to come from the far left. There was “environmental manipulation” - freezing naked human beings to near-death and back again. We heard the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe what any sane person would instantly call “torture.” Or “extraordinary rendition” - which meant kidnapping in order to torture. This time, the newspeak was coming from the neocon right. It was during the war in Iraq that Orwell’s insistence on clear language first came roaring back. That’s what “newspeak” was: a language in which it becomes hard to understand something because the words describing it are too vague and abstract to mean anything recognizable and, more worryingly, a language in which it becomes impossible to know something because the language itself has already excised the words needed to understand it. He was talking rather about how people in power can use and create new language to deceive, conceal or confuse.

Like most writers, he thrilled to new permutations of idiom and invention. But Orwell was not talking about the way in which spoken English has always mutated and shifted from the ground up. How to say things as clearly and honestly as Orwell? How to “let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about,” as he deftly put it?

” After reading these in my early teens, political writing became a vocational challenge of sorts to me. The relationship between language and politics - how each can inform or derange the other - was never better explored than in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, and his essay, “ Politics and the English Language.

Orwell english language