I was talking with a friend about what counts as good writing and mentioned George Orwell’s much celebrated essay on ‘Politics of the English language’. In it Orwell argues writers should think carefully about the language they use as doing so not only produces clear, concise articles for others to read but also enables writers to develop critical positions. Reflecting on the words and phrases you are using can help free you from following fads and prevailing orthodoxies. For example, he warned against reaching for cliches when writing and against rehashing chunks of language heard elsewhere. As he put it don’t let:
‘the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.’
He believed that most ‘political writing’ was poor:
‘When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy.’
Some of this essay about politics and language presages his novel 1984 – the one that depicts life in the totalitarian state. Here, control is manufactured as much by slogans as by raw power. Indeed, the aim of Big Brother (the ultimate authority) in the novel was to restrict what it was acceptable to say so tightly that it was literally impossible to think straight.
Orwell’s essay has stood the test of time but a criticism is his tendency here and elsewhere to over-reach. For example, he begins his essay by writing that:
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse.
Orwell illustrates this argument with examples of poor use of English but, whatever he says to the contrary, these are handpicked to support his argument Remember here that his essay was published in Horizon literary magazine and many of his fellow contributors were capable of clear writing and independent thought, but you would not know it from his essay. For that matter Churchill’s monster tome on the history of the English speaking people’s was being written in the 1940’s, though published later. And when it came to fiction, there were such diverse authors as Nancy Mitford, Malcolm Lowry, Mervyn Peak, Dodie Smith and so on. This leaves, as it often does, a sense within Orwell’s work that everyone else is duped except him. This sense of standing alone is indeed a motif in 1984 which is a story of one man (I’ll leave aside feminist criticism of Orwell, and the role of Winston’s love interest in the book for another time) up against the whole world.
As I was reading Orwell I was preparing for a trip to Dresden and my friend suggested in turn that I read Victor Klemperer on language of Nazism. Klemperer was an academic with a specialism in language and his book ‘Language of the Third Reich’ examined how the Nazis were using language to manipulate and control.
The similarity with George Orwell is obvious and, in a case of ‘art imitating life’, Klemperer was like Orwell’s protagonist Winston writing a secret diary in a totalitarian state. And Klemperer, like Orwell, is fascinated by language and appalled by its misuse. He gives three main examples of such misuse.
First, he discusses the ways that those in the public sphere rehash the same cliches and when it comes to delivery use a tone of exhortation, and invective. Again, as with Orwell, Klemperer believed that the unthinking use of cliches stops critical thinking for it is ‘language which thinks and writes for you’ (p. 20).
Second, he notices how words have changed meaning to reflect the concerns of the Nazi state. Sometimes these changes may be quite subtle and pass unnoticed. For example, the simple idea of Volk (people) had become a prefix for so many everyday expressions ‘Volkfest (festival of the people), Volkgenosse (comrade of the people)….volksnah (one of the people), volksfremd (alien to the people), volksentstammt (descending from the people) (p. 30). All this has the aim of prioritising ‘the Volk’, there is a closing down of private space for individual thought.
Klemperer noted that certain words had been refashioned. For example, fanatisch (fanatical) in German used to carry a negative connotation but had been reinvented as an ‘inordinately complimentary epithet’. The regime wanted fanatical people who would make a fanatical vow (fansitsches Gelöbnis) or carried a fanatical belief (fanatischen Glauben) or, as the regime reached its final days, would show a fierce fanatism (wilden fanatismus). He notes too how mass media had reinforced this idea of fanatical obedience. Political speeches were turned into an event and filled with brutal exhortations to show obedience to the regime. Mass media was used to ‘brutal and doggedly erect warriors ….displaying physical strength and fanatical will’.
Third, he talks about euphonism, used to immune the people from the reality of what was going on. For example, he discusses how words such as holen (to collect) and sich melden (to report) were used to hide the deportation of Jewish people behind ‘bland everyday names’ so as to suggest something everyday and commonplace was happening rather than show these event in ‘all their grim severity’. (p.187)
Where Klemperer differs from Orwell is his recognition that even in a totalitarian state there is private room for doubt and criticism. He notes in an early diary entry that on a coach tour there was a guide who began with a ‘pathos ridden poem in praise of the Fuhrer’. But, he notes, ‘everyone is silent and apathetic, at the end you notice the clapping of a single individual … the ovation is entirely absent’ (p. 33-4). He writes, too, that the ‘total madness’ of Nazism cannot be sustained once the people’s intoxication has worn off. Well, he got that one wrong or at least it took a lot longer than he thought but even in the darkest of days not everyone was taken in. For example as a Jewish worker in the factory he was expected to be shunned by the ‘Aryan workforce’ but some people were still capable of acts of kindness and recognition.
What can we take from both writers and their thoughts on language?
The first thing is that if we want to think straight then we need to think about the language we use and interrogate the phrases that come into our head. Are we saying what we want to say or are we following a line? This seems a more important question in an age where the online word is flooded with echo chambers and where AI supported programs can produce text for us. We must think for ourselves.
Second, we shut down readers if we exhort using hateful or strident language. Of course all politicians exhort rather than educate but we must call out fanaticism where it appears.
Third, from Klemperer, we should recognise even in the most totalitarian of systems the impact of propaganda is not automatic. Too often social linguists imply the job is done when they have ‘deconstructed the meaning of a text’, but this is only half the story. Why do messages resonate for some and not others?
Notes
[1] Klemperer is celebrated for his diaries of living during the Nazi period. He was Jewish under Nazi racial laws not by religious identification. The fact that he survived, though under increasingly severe restrictions, was because he was married to an ‘Aryan’, Eva Schlemmer.
[2] I am going off topic here but one of the most interesting comparisons between Klemperer and Orwell is their views on Hitler. Klemperer can understand how the propaganda works but not the unwavering appeal of Hitler for some people. He notes he asked a friend what made him so irresistible. The reply was. ‘I have no idea . but you simply cannot resist him’. Orwell in contrast writes
The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs….. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. –George Orwell, The New English Weekly, March 21, 1940
References
Orwell, G. (1946) The Politics of the English Language, Horizon, April 1946. Published by Orwell Foundation athttps://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
Orwell, G. (1940) Review of Mein Kampf, The New English Weekly, March 21, 1940 published by the Orwell Foundation [Online] https://bookmarks.reviews/george-orwells-1940-review-of-mein-kampf/
Klemperer, V. (2000) The Language of the Third Reich (translated by M. Brady), London: Athlone Press.
Michael Hammond 