Politics and the English Language - Sub Edit

Our civilization is decadent, our language must share the collapse. The half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument.

The decline of a language must have political and economic causes: it is not due to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause.

Two specimens of the English language.

1. 1. I am not sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski, Essay in Freedom of Expression

1. 2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.

Professor Lancelot Hogben, Interglossa

These passages have faults, but two qualities are common. The first is imagery; the other is lack of precision. 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 of words chosen for their meaning. I list below of which the work of prose construction is dodged:

Dying metaphors. Invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image. Between two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. When one critic writes, “The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality,” while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness,” the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion.

This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be considered.

Exhibit (3) above, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations dissolve into the vague phrases. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and despite its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version.

The aim of a metaphor is a visual image. When these images clash it can be taken as that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty-three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning.

Political speech and writing are largely the defines of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India can be defended but by arguments. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned: this is called pacification. People are imprisoned for years without trial or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.