A Turn for the Oral—and Orwell

The other day while reading Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” I came across the following passage:

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say “In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that” than to say “I think.” If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.

In other words, Orwell says, writers prefer complexity and euphony to clarity and directness. This in turn waters down our language, and since language is the clay with which we mold our thoughts, we dumb down our thinking as well.

That brought to mind a book I read in college, John McWhorter’s Doing Our Own Thing: The Degredation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care . Part of McWhorter’s thesis is that we no longer value the formality and structure of writing. Our culture values the spoken word, which is by nature more focused on the flow of the sounds, more spontaneous, and therefore less developed and thought out than prose.

We can see this in the difference between the song lyrics, journalism, and political speeches of the 1940s and those of today. As we outgrew oratory and cogent sentences, we forgot that they were conducive to concrete thought. The rise of post-modernism didn’t help either. If there is no truth or definite meaning, language becomes reduced to its form. If sentences can’t say much, they might as well sound nice and intelligent.

Orwell’s solution to this problem—at least the linguistic part—was to write with care and to write well: “What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.” Fight with your words as you fight for them, for precision in meaning and argument is needed in our time.