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September 24, 2006

Clarity, George Orwell, and torture

There are two things that are bothering me every time I turn on this computer.

One is the load of work that I haven't gotten done and the load of people I need to talk to and haven't.

The second is this George Orwell essay entitled "Politics and the English Language".

In my uneducated state, I first heard of this essay on Friday when I was listening to NPR (as I was driving back from Athens). In one of a series of "You Must Read This" essays on All Things Considered, Lawrence Wright argued the importance of the essay, especially in this time where "politics and the English language once again seem to be at odds". And many of the arguments laid out - that the English language has been neutered by, whether carelessly or cynically, a writer using words without regard to their actual meaning - make a great deal of sense.

In regards to the problems with "modern writing" circa 1946, Orwell offers two cases in point:

The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

I really wonder why I haven't read this before. Sudennly "Orwellian doublespeak" has a whole new meaning to me.

And is this a time where Orwellian doublespeak is finding more and more widespread use? As if Wright's essay didn't resonate with me enough, Andrew Sullivan has spent the past three days absolutely pounding both the Bush administration and the Congress for striking an "agreement" to "clarify" what "alternative interrogation methods" are allowed for terror suspects. Sullivan offers a series of "clarifications" in the Sunday Times today, taking neutral names for these "coercive interrogation techniques" and calling them what they really are, citing other "wimps" and "liberals" on the way...

“There is the method of simply compelling a prisoner to stand there. This can be arranged so that the accused stands only while being interrogated — because that, too, exhausts and breaks a person down.

“It can be set up in another way — so that the prisoner sits down during interrogation but is forced to stand up between interrogations. (A watch is set over him, and the guards see to it that he doesn’t lean against the wall, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.) Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive a person of all his strength and to force him to testify to anything at all.”

What wimp wrote that? Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who documented “long time standing” as a method used by the Soviet Union in the gulag.

I'm nervous about living in this time in history. I feel like just hammering out thoughts on a laptop, or standing in front of people and yammering about physics or chemistry or even theology, isn't doing nearly enough.

I suppose using clear language is a start to changing things. I suppose encouraging people who are influenced by me to use clear language is another.

But I still feel like I can be, should be doing more.

Meanwhile, I still have e-mails to answer.

(You should read the whole essay yourself if you have any interest in English communication. Here is a version in HTML, courtesy of Mt. Holyoke; and here's a very nice printable .pdf, courtesy of Stanford, for you to clip and save.)

Posted by Chuck at September 24, 2006 05:22 PM

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