George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” written in 1946, has been a staple of the curricular diet for generations of students over the decades across universities of the world. In that essay, Orwell treats thought and language as being in a dialectical relationship. While we may suppose that the one simply determines the other, he insists that an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form. Therefore, if thought corrupts language, he says, language can also corrupt thought.
From that premise, he argues that to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration, connecting linguistic clarity directly to political ends. He rejects the idea that language is merely a natural growth and insists that it is an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. Because modern written English contains bad habits that spread by imitation, he hopes that those habits could be corrected. He recommends starting from clear mental pictures or sensations and then finding precise words. When writers begin instead with words, they become prone to assemble long strips of processed language that have been engineered by someone else, producing humbug and derivative prose.
At the same time, Orwell oscillates between two meta-positions about language’s relationship with society. On the one hand, he asserts a social determinism: the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes and language merely reflects existing social conditions. On the other hand, he advances a prescriptive, voluntarist counsel for writers. “What is above all needed,” he writes, “is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.” He urges writers to visualize concretely before putting words to things. “When you think of a concrete object,” he adds, “you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit,” and to “put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations.”
Orwell thus derives a practical program of stylistic prescription. He identifies specific problems—“dying metaphors,” hackneyed and evasive phrases, and what he calls “meaningless words”—and urges their removal. Orwell holds that corrupt language and corrupt politics are mutually reinforcing. He warns that habitual, blown-out metaphors and careless phrases allow thought to be blurred or contorted. Further, he sees political language as frequently serving “the defence of the indefensible” by employing euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.
Examples he singles out include the transformation of brutal acts into tame official phrases, as in violent civilian attacks rendered as “pacification,” and the way political vocabulary can be stretched to mean almost anything. He criticizes the preference for passive constructions and noun phrases in modern prose, the substitution of gerunds and nominalizations for verbs—for example, “by examination of” instead of “by examining”—and the deliberate use of symmetrical or padded phrasing, for example, “render inoperative” or “exhibit a tendency to,” that softens accountability. He warns that such tricks give sentences an appearance of symmetry while dulling moral perception.
In the same vein, many political and critical abstractions—terms like “fascism,” in his view—have become emotionally charged but semantically vague. He advises using such words with circumspection and defining terms where confusion is possible. Orwell lays the blame on politics as a debilitating phenomenon in the social life of the English language. Political prose, he argues, tends toward lifeless imitation and euphemism.
“Political writing is bad writing,” he says, and political language is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” According to Orwell, he gives concrete illustrations of euphemistic political diction: “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, and the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: and this is called pacification.”
He associates these images with the canned, ready-made phrases of political platforms and leading articles. He asks readers to watch “some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny”—and to feel that they are not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy. Orwell juxtaposes vivid, concrete scenes of violence with the flattened nomenclature that political language substitutes in the name of “pacification,” “rectification of frontiers,” or “elimination of unreliable elements.”
Above all, Orwell insists on social responsibility for writers. He maintains that conscious awareness of one’s bias improves the honesty and usefulness of political writing and that good political prose should reduce large problems to personal images rather than hide behind jargon. This refusal to mix metaphors and his meticulous choice of fresh concrete imagery was central to his style and theory. He recommends a plain style, tracing its affinities with seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century plainness, and gives concrete rules such as preferring Anglo-Saxon words over Latinate abstractions. He writes, for example, that concrete words are better than abstract ones and that the shortest way of saying anything is always the best, and he advises that “if you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.” He singles out long political and critical terms as especially suspect, condemning usages of words like democracy, socialism, freedom, justice, class, totalitarian, science, bourgeois, and even equality in the manner that they were deployed in contemporary public discourse.
Without doubt, Orwell links defective language to deception. “The great enemy of clear language,” according to him, “is insincerity.” To him, inflated phrasings are instruments of political defence and evasion. From Orwell’s perspective, such euphemism is not mere stylistic weakness but a tool that defends the indefensible and thereby aids political abuses.
Orwell’s essay is unmistakable for his implicit recognition of the ultimate danger of linguistic engineering. It reminds us of Orwell’s own fictional construction in Nineteen Eighty-Four, that is Newspeak, whose purpose in the novel is not only to provide a medium of expression and habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc but to obviate other modes of thought. Besides, Newspeak and doublethink enable people and administrators to hold or utter contradictory beliefs without any guilt whatsoever. Orwell used this contraption to show how linguistic manipulation can underwrite totalitarian power. It also reflected the modern era’s widespread cultural pessimism about institutions that foster monotony and mass repetition.
Orwell popularized images such as “Big Brother” and the “gramophone mind” to describe how sameness of expression anesthetizes public judgment and makes populations susceptible to propaganda. By eliminating undesirable words and stripping remaining words of unorthodox meanings, Newspeak makes certain concepts nameless—for instance, political and intellectual freedom—so that people cannot form or express the ideas necessary to resist tyranny. The novel’s mechanisms—the Party’s rewriting of history, doublethink, and the control of vocabulary—exemplify his thesis that linguistic manipulation prevents empirical argument.
Furthermore, Newspeak’s reduction of vocabulary and purging of generalizing terms is presented as a literal implementation of the logic underlying Orwell’s prescriptions. Newspeak embodies three core procedures.
First, the reduction of vocabulary: words judged undesirable are eliminated and remaining words are stripped of unorthodox meanings so that certain concepts—political or intellectual freedom, for example—become nameless or are restricted to purely concrete uses. Second, morphological and syntactic regularization: the resulting language aims for one-to-one mapping between concept and morpheme, extreme derivational regularity, interchangeability of parts of speech, and uniform inflectional paradigms so that ambiguity and nuance are purged. Third, lexical compounding and incorporation into a compact stock of basic elements produce a high proportion of compound political lexemes—crimethink, crimestop, goodthink, etc.—yielding a predictable, closed vocabulary designed to encode the Party’s ontology.
Unlike Orwell’s intention, Newspeak is an artificially planned, closed, elite sublanguage whose structural properties are intended to delimit and control conceptualization rather than merely to increase communicative efficiency. Newspeak is best understood as akin to an extreme, politically motivated sublanguage rather than a mere stylistic variant of English. Sublanguages have high predictability, closure, and a restricted universe of reference; Newspeak exhibits all three: precise predictability of word-strings, theoretical closure with no admission of new lexical items, and a lexicon that maps onto the limited reality prescribed ideologically.
Language on this account is not merely a tool for persuasion but a structural determinant of what can be conceived. Perfecting political language toward definitional rigidity is, for Orwell, a route to the complete revolutionary state in which thoughtcrime is impossible because the words to frame dissent have been erased. This highlights the challenge that when the state can thrust its hand into the past and say that such and such incident never occurred, individual memory and documentary proof lose purchase. Everything fades away into a shadow-world in which even the date or year in which certain incidents occurred becomes obscured.
Under such conditions, language engineering collapses the possibility of public standards of comparison and testing of evidence. Without shared linguistic and documentary anchors, differences, irony, parody, doubt, and modes of thought essential to plural democratic life become inconceivable. Language elimination and engineering thus serve the political end of indistinct, undifferentiated loyalty to power. The result comprises a pseudo-intelligentsia, wartime euphemisms, technocratic scientization of discourse, and habitually abstracted rhetoric that converts concrete persons and places into manageable abstractions. Such linguistic practices facilitate a continuous-war mentality that is precisely the soil in which totalizing political power thrives.
Understanding the dangers of a grand theory of language, Orwell does not shy away from disclaimers in his own essay. He explicitly admits to having again and again committed the very faults he was protesting against, and his own writing depends in part on the broader class of words and abstractions he sometimes condemns. Despite his alarm, Orwell ultimately believes that the decay of language can be resisted. He urges conscientious writers to reclaim precision, to define terms, and to favor concrete imagery and clear verbs. He repeatedly argues that the obligation to “say what we mean” is a fundamental political freedom because, by choosing words carefully, writers and readers protect the possibility of alternative thought and action. Orwell’s convictions are illustrated throughout his own writings, as in Burmese Days and Animal Farm, where he uses concrete examples to expose how language both disguises and enables political wrongdoing.
Nonetheless, Orwell locates hope in ordinary concrete language and in nonstandard, working-class usages. He argues that the vitality of English depends on images reinvigorated from below and that the working classes, being in contact with physical reality, tend to use simpler, concrete language that calls up mental pictures and resists abstractions detached from observation. Orwell’s is fundamentally a politics of hope, not of cynicism. He presents the condition of the English language as urgent but remediable. He begins with the claim that “most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way,” and insists on the possibility of deliberate, conscious action to alter usage and save the language from decay, urging readers to take the necessary trouble to fight the decline.
Orwell appears as both a diagnostician of modern political life and a moralist about language. Although he advocates a doctrine of plain writing, his linguistic prescription coexists with the demand that prose must still be powerful and evocative enough to render thick description and to convey unpleasant truths. For Orwell, the moral task of the writer is twofold: cut away euphemism and humbug while preserving the language’s capacity for fine discrimination, complexity, and aesthetic force. Language must be defended as a public resource that enables debate, remembrance, and the possibility of truth. To preserve individualism and eccentricity as positive values and to keep the apparatus of truth-testing alive, writers and citizens alike must resist orthodoxies and conformity, expose corruptions of language, and cherish the discerning faculties that make democratic judgment possible.
Orwell’s critique is reminiscent of the sixteenth-century Inkhorn controversy. It was a debate between purists who wanted English or Saxon words in the public sphere and advocates of learned loanwords from Latin and Greek. Both the purists and Orwell saw lexical choice as political. The Inkhorn debate’s purists argued that foreign words made discourse elitist and inaccessible, while Orwell condemned Latinate grandiose diction for dignifying “the sordid process of international politics” and for enabling obfuscation.
The Inkhorn debate sought to make new learning accessible to the English public; Orwell likewise believed that there is “no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English,” warning that words like expedite, ameliorate, or predict displace straightforward Anglo-Saxon equivalents. Whereas the Inkhorn controversy contested lexical prestige on cultural and pedagogical grounds, Orwell framed the stakes as explicitly political.
Orwell even parodied modern prose, translating a verse from Ecclesiastes into pompous modern prose to demonstrate how learned language converts clear thought into objective abstractions and distances readers from lived realities. However, there is a nuanced difference between the Inkhorn controversy and Orwell’s views. The former centered on enrichment versus purity of lexicon; Orwell’s concern, however, is instrumental. The Inkhorn controversy supplies a historical precedent and the rhetorical vocabulary for Orwell’s argument that defending plain, Saxon-rooted English is a democratic act—vital to exposing lies and preserving the capacity for dissent.
Surely Orwell’s views on politics and the English language are still open to interpretation, and the jury is still out on whether Orwell belongs in one camp or another, whether he goes against his own beliefs or practices them perfectly. But the larger question that lingers after reading Orwell in global academia today is this: the tiny part of the world—London or England—from where Orwell was writing no longer wields a monopoly over the destiny of the English language. Orwell wrote in what may be described as a still-colonial era. The postcolonial age he never saw would lead to rapid transformations in the English language, culminating in developments—such as artificial intelligence systems—that commit the very acts that would have horrified Orwell: hastily joining prefabricated phrases into jargonized sentences that excel at distorting and annihilating meaning.
And besides that, there is another, more obvious hazard that has lurked within the politics of the English language for at least as long as the British colonists built universities in their colonies, including Africa and India. Let us not forget the history of George Orwell’s own family. George Orwell, as we know, was born Eric Blair and his birthplace was Motihari in Bihar, India. That inspires us to ask what if the English language is not spoken or written in service of the English race or people but in active disservice to it.
Arup K. Chatterjee 