Politics and the English Language

"Politics and the English Language" is an essay by George Orwell, published in April 1946 in the journal Horizon, to which he contributed one of his last major articles. It appeared almost at the same time as another of his essays, "The Prevention of Literature", and both reflect a central concern of his work: the relationship between truth and the use of language. Orwell wrote it during a period of intense activity, after the death of his wife in 1945 and the success of "Animal Farm", while he was already preparing what would become "Nineteen Eighty-Four".

Its central claim is that the written English of his time, especially political prose, had become "ugly and inaccurate". Orwell argues that this decline is not merely stylistic: political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. Because its purpose is to conceal rather than express, such language is necessarily vague or meaningless. This unclear prose spreads like a contagion even to those who have nothing to hide, so that writers end up concealing their own thoughts from themselves. Orwell describes a self-reinforcing process: degraded language makes muddled thinking easier, and muddled thinking further impoverishes language.

The essay examines several specific vices, including dying metaphors, verbal padding, pretentious diction and meaningless words. To illustrate them, Orwell quotes passages from contemporary writers and offers a "translation" of Ecclesiastes 9:11 into the worst kind of modern English, which is longer yet lacks the concrete images and force of the original. As a remedy he proposes six practical rules, among them avoiding figures of speech one is used to seeing in print, preferring short words, cutting out what is unnecessary and favouring the active voice, while warning that following them is no guarantee of good writing. The essay is widely taught in writing courses and frequently cited in discussions of political communication, though it has also drawn criticism, for instance for its strict rejection of familiar phrases and its treatment of the passive voice.