Saturday, March 23, 2013
"Politics and the English Language"
Choose one passage from Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" that is the most meaningful to you. Write 250-300 words in response to this extract, explaining what it means to you in the context of this essay and/or in the context of contemporary society, and whether or not you agree with Orwell's claim(s). Post to the class blog.
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In George Orwell's Essay „Politics and the English Language“, the paragraph about dying metaphors stood out most to me. Unfortunately it seems to be that most people use metaphors without really knowing what a metaphor is or what they want to say with it. It is just that some of them happen to be used so often that people start using them unconsciously, just because they add some linguistic elegance to their writing – if properly used. “Fishing in troubled waters”, oh yes that sounds nice, why not write that? Well if it relater to the text, I guess go for it. But sometimes people would use that completely out of context. Orwell gave the example of toe the line which he apparently saw written as tow the line, which doesn't really make sense anymore. If someone twists a metaphor like this, it makes him seem rather unprofessional, his attempt to impress totally backfires. And of course, this phenomenon cannot only be observed in the English language.
ReplyDeleteNow what is a metaphor? According to Wikipedia, it is a rhetorical figure which compares a subject to something that would otherwise be unrelated. So to come back to toe the line, it of course has nothing to do with an actual line, but rather that the line stands for rules or standards and to toe it would just be a metaphor for following the rules, adapt to the standard. That doesn't sound so hard. So why, just like Orwell said, are people so afraid of coming up with their own metaphors? Are they really, like he puts it, just to idle to think about what they want to say?
I find the second paragraph of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” very interesting. It serves as the introduction to his entire piece and I think it sums it up quite well. It speaks of how the decline of the english language is a cycle of downfalls that ultimately leads to a very unproductive language. Although some may say that little changes to a language do not matter compared to the larger scale of a language, Orwell argues that these details do in fact matter because even the smallest of them end up spiraling into greater degradation of the language. He explains that the cause and effect method not only relates this circumstance in the way that bad habits of speaking results in foolishness of thoughts, but he also speaks of how this foolishness of thoughts results in further declination of the English language. Again, this is just a continuing cycle of the ultimate corruption of the English language according to Orwell. However, in this extract, Orwell also suggests that these bad habits of speaking a language incorrectly can be solved. He says that if one just works on getting rid of these habits, then they will be able to think more clearly without any frivolous thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Orwell because I believe most of what we say is a garbled production of words that we think fit well together, but ultimately result in a confusing and quite frankly, ugly, language. I completely agree with Orwell’s claim that if the bad habits of speaking English are broken, then there is a chance for a renewal of more efficient use of the English language and in turn a more efficient thought process. I also think that this is a well fitting introduction for the entire article because although it expresses his anger towards the way that English is used nowadays, it more importantly evokes a sense of hope that if the bad habits explained later in the article are solved, then English could become a much more successful language.
There is a paragraph talks about political writing. George Orwell says political writing is vague and imitative. People who writes political writing has to sometime be turned into machine which writes out speeches in a fixed style automatically. Also he says political language consists of large amount of euphemism to defend the indefensible. In my understanding of George Orwell’s argument is that political language is made to depict politics in a “nicer” way in which sometime means to embellish it and make it vague. Its language is barren and contains no human emotion.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, George Orwell is partly true. Politicians have long been used their language to satisfy people even though sometime it means euphemism and concealment. I agree that sometime reading a political writing is time-wasting because after all I can not get the points they try to get across. It leads people to a enigma due to its vagueness and abstraction. However, I think it is very hard to change this pattern of writing because political language is more of a macroscopical narration which is different from a opinions piece or a personal argument. It can only be used in such a general and ambiguous form to reach its purpose.
The paragraph that stood out to me the most was definitely the paragraph that talked about dying metaphors. I think that this is so meaningful to me because it shows how our language has evolved in so many ways. Not only the words we use but how we use those words has changed. And how the old ways in which we used them have left and "died".
ReplyDeleteBut what he mainly talks about is how nowadays, people abuse the use of metaphors. People like to use them with out even realizing it. Many people like to use this form of writing in there essays to make it more interesting and relatable. Which is perfectly fine but when people use it just because other people are using it and have know idea what it really means or where in context to use it, it begins to get out of hand. A perfect example is what his concluding statement says, "Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase." He is exactly right. If people just understood what they were saying, they would realize that what they are saying is wrong.
I think that what he is saying here is pretty accurate. It's kind of what I was saying a while back in class. In today's world, we say things that would be so far out of context a couple years ago. Our idea in 2013 is that it doesn't have to make sense to sound good enough to say. And that shouldn't be.
In George Orwell's "Politics and English Language", the passage of Operators or verbal false limbs is very interesting. As Orwell has introduced in the prior paragraphs, prose consists fewer and fewer words of the author's original thinking. Instead, people are more likely to use phrases in the context of writings, which is attributed by convert easy verbs to long phrases, like "play a leading role in". George Orwell believes that in the writing, people should cut out unnecessary words and don’t use long words if it one word can replace them. In the contemporary society, people are interested in saying a lot of stuffs although they mean nothing at all, especially in someone’s speech. If one word can describe a phenomenon, why using a set of long words?
ReplyDeleteFor my opinion, whether to use long words or short verbs depends on the situation. In political writings, George Orwell’s point is true, since the writing should be brief and easily understanding if its target audience is everyone. Usually people do not like to read tedious and long writing, as it takes time and is difficult to find the focuses. However, in the context of personal writing, it doesn’t really matter to choose long phrases or one verb. However, choosing long phrases is a nice way to avoid using the same verb for more than once.
The paragraph that stands out the most to me to this one which starts with “The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism.” Orwell then goes to explain how people turn to long words as sort of an escape from their real writing. He describes it to a “cuttlefish spurting out ink.” This stood out to me because it is such strong language. Orwell seems to be writing with no regrets. Like most of the essay, he is speaking his mind and that come across a great deal in his writing. The main point I see in this paragraph is that he says languages will suffer more so if their country is a dictatorship. He goes on to give the examples of Russia, Germany, and Italy during the time period leading up to the Second World War. This is a very interesting idea, because I wonder in which way he thinks they will suffer most. It could be in the sense that there is no evolution, or too much evolution. He could also be referring to an earlier idea that there is a problem when people use long words, or how there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics”.
ReplyDeleteI would say that Orwell’s ideas may overlap with the current ideas of many people today. Many people will think that others use certain language to hide what they are really saying. An example of this is in politics, where candidates will sometimes be given a question to answer, and they will change the question in their answer to bring it back to something they had practised for. This was shown during one of the presidential debates last year, when both candidates were asked questions from the audience.
The passage that really stood out to me was the longer paragraph about the devolution of English. He described English as becoming sloppy and ugly and that “foolish thoughts” were the result. He likens this to when a man drinks when he feels bad, but then he fails all the more because of his drinking. I thought that was an amazing metaphor that really got the point across. That English is becoming ugly and inaccurate, and creating foolish thoughts. But, the sloppiness of our language makes it much easier for us to have such foolish thoughts in the first place. He then points out that the process can be reversed by hard work and avoiding some very basic mistakes that have been made by some very experienced writers. But when a person forgets these habits they begin to think more clearly. And that this is first step to “political regeneration” which makes me think he was talking about government or political problems to begin with.
ReplyDeleteIt is clear the George Orwell is a very passionate man with a lot to say. Especially about the English language. And after reading all of his criticisms I can’t help but feel unintelligent. But, I also agree with him. Much of our writing is filled with fluff and doesn’t progress our writing. It does in our mind make our paper flow more clearly and sound better, but is there a way to write an intro that cleanly and concise states an argument, then have a paper that is very concise and complete devoid of any fluff? I don’t think so.
To me, the most interesting part of Orwell's essay was when he described how political speech and writing is used to cloud the truth from the proletariat. His comments are still incredibly relevant. It reminds me of earlier this year when we spent a few days on satire; my favorite part of that unit was the Jonathan Swift essay 'A Modest Proposal'. He used very fanciful and complicated speech to convince the user (some of this was because of the time, but still). Orwell, I think, would have approved of this satire and enjoyed the flouting of his rules to prove his point. By that I mean he would approve of Swift's breaking of his rules and showing that political speech is jargon obscuring the point. Later when we wrote our own pieces we, though we didn't know it yet, were, like Swift, purposefully ignoring Orwell’s rules in order to make sure we said nothing while saying a lot. This shows that politics really haven’t changed from Swift’s to Orwell’s to our time with politicians, most are avoiding the issue or ignoring it to gain the vote of ‘ regular everyday folks’. Orwell’s essay shows that even today people are still making sure that issues are curtained off from the public’s view because of fanciful wording and insincere promises. My favorite part of this point of the essay was this line “When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
ReplyDeletePretentious Dictation stood out to me the most. In this section George Orwell wrote about how words such as element, individual, and virtual are used to over complicate much smaller and basic concepts.This stood out to me because in most to all my writing I tend to want to add larger, more descriptive words. The reason for this is unclear to me. Bigger words usually show signs of the writer being more intelligent, but George Orwell is totally disagreeing. He also shows a high defense of the current English language. A lot of words like "status quo" are words that showed a high amount of elegance in the English language, Orwell believes they are useless and simpler words can fit their spot without losing the meaning. He also goes on to saying that politicians and bad writers (notice the two nouns together) are haunted with the belief that Anglo Saxon phrases and words can sound good in writing. I can relate to this is a peculiar way. In elementary school my teachers wanted us to experience with different words in our writing, and obscure words and phrases seemed more intellectual then the same old boring stuff. I learned that George Orwell is a stickler to the present use of the language (the present use in his time). He wants writers to be simple but effective, and this paragraph has and will influence my writing completely.
ReplyDeleteIt mentions about meaningless words that some words do not point to any discoverable object, and the readers do not. Such situations usually find in art criticism and political English. When I read about art criticisms and some movie critical reviews I find that there are so literary and artistic that I could hardly understand. Moreover, I ascribe it to the reason that I am too superficial and not what to say an art person. However, as I grow up, I find one of the implications of those criticisms is the art has depth meaning, and distinguish artists from normal people.
ReplyDeleteAs for some political English, sometimes, I read a long paragraph and really get nothing for it. Some of the words are so popular that everyone use them, such as democracy, freedom, justice, realistic. All of them are big words. especially in political English, Politicians need some big words to make their speeches or documents sound good. As for audience, they regard such words as just symbols without really meanings.
However, for both art criticisms and political English, such words mark the specialness of the styles of the writings and they serve different purposes as well. Suppose that an art criticism is so straight forward, it is hard for it to describe the beauty of the art. Suppose that a politician uses frank and honest words in his speeches, there must be leaks that his opponent could easily find out.