Through with Euphemism

Nineteen Eighty-Four has its roots in George Orwell’s 1945 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell published the piece in Horizon, a literary journal styled as a successor to T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion, and whatever the intervening criticism of Orwell’s work or this essay in particular, I think it reads brilliantly in 2025. This post offers a selection of quotations and my notes. But before digging in, I want to get out my critiques.

First, Orwell wrote as if modern English is especially inane. He disregarded the fact that most writers and speakers throughout history have recited, at least on occasion, nonsense in service of politics. Second, context is missing from Orwell’s account. For example, I assume that liberal warfare harms language as does dictatorship, and that mass media of the kinds introduced during Orwell’s lifetime do not help. Third, the essay’s “catalogue of swindles and perversions” and its formulaic tips for better writing distract readers from the main idea, that genuine thought is being replaced by doubletalk, euphemizing, and willful distortion.[^1]

Form affects content, and vice versa, so I agree with the claim that politics and language can be mutually degrading. The notion that patriotism forbids sincere communication is as apparent after 9/11 as it was after WWII. Hence we have a war on terror, which implies the murder of muslims and their families. But enough of that.

Here are some of my favorite bits from Orwell’s influential essay.

His argument and advice required less than a paragraph:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

I find it ironic whenever someone advocates English becoming less of a bastard tongue, but I appreciate the call to action:

There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the *not un-* formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable.

Then, with resolute irony, the essay continues:

[The defence of the English language] has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.

It ends with a weaker exhortation, but one I still abide:

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase... into the dustbin where it belongs.

I omitted Orwell’s selection of worn-out phrases from the quotation above, as they are now dead. Instead, I propose binning current Orwellian phrases like stand with, trumpism, content creator, privacy policy, and making progress.

Lastly, since a picture is worth a thousand words (pardon the trite phrase), I leave behind a scan of Ostrom and Haltom’s (2018) propaganda chart, which compares Orwell’s approach in “Politics and the English Language” (1945) with Jacques Ellul’s in Propagandes (1962)[^2].

[1] See Irony Two – Gripes and Gibes, in Hans Ostrom and William Haltom, Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” in the Age of Pseudocracy (Routledge, 2018), 3.

[2] Ibid., 46.