Orwell: alive and well

In saying that George Orwell is alive and well, I don't refer to the dark element of Trumpism (Steve Bannon, et al.) today or the fears it has unleashed; I am not thinking of the novel 1984 with its theme of a totalitarian future with Big Brother watching us. It's too late for that.

Rather, I'm thinking of the classic essay from 1946, "Politics and the English Language," which once was required reading in my writing courses, even if some of the examples are, by now, dated and obscure.

No one has better captured the modern tendency toward abstraction and pretentious jargon than this essay.  And I am sorry to say my colleagues in the academic world of the humanities, especially English, are still committing the sins Orwell singled out.

Consider this sentence from a book recently published by the University of Michigan Press (its subject is Middlemarch, the classic novel by George Eliot, who would be appalled or amused by what passes here as literary criticism):

"The grammatical concatenation of subject and action is straightforward, even in the self-constitutive modality of the middle voice; but is the subject that is effected in the middle voice in any way phenomenalizable?"

This may mean something to a fellow academic forced to read such pretentious writing in order for the author (whose name I omit) to get promoted or tenured: who else would bother to read such prose, which is all too typical of academic writing with its abstract, jargon-filled language designed to impress one's colleagues?

And that was Orwell's point: too often words are chosen not for their meaning but writing is made from ready-made phrases, made fashionable by someone else.  The result is unclear, unoriginal, and often meaningless.  Concrete terms melt into the abstract, he said, and writers rely on clichés, vagueness, and jargon that fails to do what language is meant to do: communicate clearly to another human being.

If you don't know Orwell's essay, which shows how careless thought corrupts language and how careless language corrupts thought, you might find it on line. It remains timeless as an indictment of what passes for a great deal of literary criticism today, which I find impossible to read.

Hyped Language, Bad Writing

As a teacher of writing, I usually show students examples of good prose style in the hope that they will learn from the masters what makes a memorable sentence.  I rarely exhibit examples of awful writing.

This week, however, in editing a thesis on the education of nurses, I once again encountered an example of the worst kind of academic prose, the kind of pompous, inflated, jargon-filled sentences that seem designed to impress one's colleagues.  Even English professors, alas, resort to such writing to be current. And their work needs to be exposed as dangerous and fraudulent.

The thesis in question exhibits the type of deadly language that George Orwell memorably deplored in 1946 (his classic essay "Politics and the English Language"). There he noted the linguistic fog that tends to obscure clarity and fresh thinking because writers tend to rely on ready-made phrases, not just in political discourse but in most fields. If only he were still around to see how educators themselves pass on bad writing habits to their students!

How else explain my nursing student's reliance on articles and books that are filled with passive verbs and sentences that seem designed to deaden the brain. Consider:  "A database must be created though the use of multiple sources of evidence by preceptors in their perceptions...."  Can you imagine 112 pages of this?

This piece is all about the perceptions of preceptors (a repeated phrase) and the preparedness of student nurses: simple ideas dressed up in the most tacky style imaginable, a style in which simple verbs (measure) are converted into windy verb phrases (perform a measurement). Why? Because that is the way the experts write, and my poor student is afraid to deviate from the style advocated by her professors and the scholars admired by those professors.

This is the Read, Write, and Regurgitate School of Writing, just as widespread today, if not more so, than when Orwell criticized it. It led me to a dramatic decision today: I will edit no more theses or dissertations.  I do so not for the money, which is negligible, but to be helpful to students, many foreign-born, who need guidance in their use of idioms and grammar.

The type of jargon-filled prose I so strongly oppose has little to do with grammar. It has to do with an inflated type of writing so far removed from the way English is spoken as to constitute a foreign language, a dialect spoken by many--too many--who consider themselves elite. 
What can I do besides refusing to read such stuff? Like chemical pollution, it will always be with us; it won't go away, and any effort to rewrite awful sentences more effectively is met with resistance.

So I must try my best to keep writing clearly and honestly, to read only the best writers, and to encourage those I know to do the same.

Disruptive Language

Just when we think we know what English words mean, they change. Take "disruptive," for example, which used to be a bad thing, as when kids disrupted classes with various disturbances.

Now--but for how long?--it can mean "innovative," thanks to a Harvard Business professor, Clayton Christiansen, whose 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma gave the word a positive thrust, a new bit of jargon that the business world has picked up on: the idea of a disruptive innovation in the status quo.

For a critique of the social and implications of this usage, see the piece by Judith Shulevitz in the New Republic (Aug. 15), who says that "disruptive" has replaced "empowering" and "transformational" as buzz-words.

A more serious linguistic problem, it seems, is posed when words are thought to mean what we all have agreed they mean and begin to be used--like hoi polloi--to signify the opposite of what the dictionary records.

Consider "literally," which quite often no longer means literally but its opposite, figuratively, rather than exactly.  Martha Gill in The Guardian has a recent piece on this. She suggests that the word is best avoided at present. Soon, like tattoo craze, it will fade.

She is referring to such popular usage as "I could literally eat an entire cow," when you want emphasis and don't really mean literally at all. Dictionaries, ever vigilant, have begun to record the newer usage, one of them stating that "literally can be used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling."

In other words, language doesn't necessarily mean it did until recently; and English, like the vines in my yard, is growing out of control. But before we panic, remember that at issue is conversational, colloquial English, not the written word. What is colloquial can rapidly change. The issue is not serious.

Writers, we must hope, will be more conservative and traditional in using "literally" to mean literally, not that disruptive newer usage.

Meaningless Language

"I don't understand what anyone is saying anymore," writes Dan Pallotta in the Harvard Business Review. He describes business conversations in which he has very little idea of what people are saying to him.

Is he hard of hearing? No. Stupid? No. The people who talk to him in generalities and cliches are the ones he calls stupid. He is tired of meaningless cliches like "think outside the box" as well as filling sentences with buzz words, acronyms, and abstractions that make no logical sense.

Another writer in the same journal, psychologist Art Markam of the University of Texas (May 3), talks about corporate board members talking on and on about streamlining without anybody having a clear idea of what it means. Yet those at the table nod in agreement, even when the speaker cannot define exactly how to streamline the company in question.

We don't know as much as we think, writes Markam. It's what psychologists call "the illustion of explanatory depth." We think we understand how something works when we don't and cover up our ignorance with jargon and buzz words.

Is it any wonder that the AIG crisis and what followed took place? Language is consciously used to mislead or confuse, as it sometimes is in politics. No one has analyzed this issue more astutely than George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language," a 1946 essay that seems dated now in its examples drawn from the era of fascism. But his central point is important.

When writers and speakers fail to think clearly and choose words that reflect their thought and instead rely on ready-made phrases, Orwell wrote, they end up deceiving not only their readers but themselves. Their reliance on cliches obscures the very purpose of writing.

With this in mind, I was surprised to read in the New York Times last month a piece by John McWhorter, a noted linguist, asserting that both text messages and emails are equally valid forms of written conversation as opposed to the old, more formal writing, which he strangely illustates with 18th and 19th century examples. I was surprised that McWhorter does not consider emails in business and in other contexts in which concise information is conveyed that is often important--a far cry from the semi-coherent babble of much texting.

Overhearing a cell phone conversation recently, I heard a string of half-sentences strung together with "like" and "you know" and "mmm," saying nothing much, making the ramblings of Sarah Palin sound almost articulate. If this is the essence of the brave new world of written conversation and if this--the democratic innovation of our times--is one of the two types of writing now available to us, as McWhorter seems to suggest, I say we should re-read what Orwell has to say on the subject.