george orwell essay politics and the english language summary

A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946) is one of the best-known essays by George Orwell (1903-50). As its title suggests, Orwell identifies a link between the (degraded) English language of his time and the degraded political situation: Orwell sees modern discourse (especially political discourse) as being less a matter of words chosen for their clear meanings than a series of stock phrases slung together.

You can read ‘Politics and the English Language’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Orwell’s essay below.

‘Politics and the English Language’: summary

Orwell begins by drawing attention to the strong link between the language writers use and the quality of political thought in the current age (i.e. the 1940s). He argues that if we use language that is slovenly and decadent, it makes it easier for us to fall into bad habits of thought, because language and thought are so closely linked.

Orwell then gives five examples of what he considers bad political writing. He draws attention to two faults which all five passages share: staleness of imagery and lack of precision . Either the writers of these passages had a clear meaning to convey but couldn’t express it clearly, or they didn’t care whether they communicated any particular meaning at all, and were simply saying things for the sake of it.

Orwell writes that this is a common problem in current political writing: ‘prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.’

Next, Orwell elaborates on the key faults of modern English prose, namely:

Dying Metaphors : these are figures of speech which writers lazily reach for, even though such phrases are worn-out and can no longer convey a vivid image. Orwell cites a number of examples, including toe the line , no axe to grind , Achilles’ heel , and swansong . Orwell’s objection to such dying metaphors is that writers use them without even thinking about what the phrases actually mean, such as when people misuse toe the line by writing it as tow the line , or when they mix their metaphors, again, because they’re not interested in what those images evoke.

Operators or Verbal False Limbs : this is when a longer and rather vague phrase is used in place of a single-word (and more direct) verb, e.g. make contact with someone, which essentially means ‘contact’ someone. The passive voice is also common, and writing phrases like by examination of instead of the more direct by examining . Sentences are saved from fizzling out (because the thought or idea being conveyed is not particularly striking) by largely meaningless closing platitudes such as greatly to be desired or brought to a satisfactory conclusion .

Pretentious Diction : Orwell draws attention to several areas here. He states that words like objective , basis , and eliminate are used by writers to dress up simple statements, making subjective opinion sound like scientific fact. Adjectives like epic , historic , and inevitable are used about international politics, while writing that glorifies war is full of old-fashioned words like realm , throne , and sword .

Foreign words and phrases like deus ex machina and mutatis mutandis are used to convey an air of culture and elegance. Indeed, many modern English writers are guilty of using Latin or Greek words in the belief that they are ‘grander’ than home-grown Anglo-Saxon ones: Orwell mentions Latinate words like expedite and ameliorate here. All of these examples are further proof of the ‘slovenliness and vagueness’ which Orwell detects in modern political prose.

Meaningless Words : Orwell argues that much art criticism and literary criticism in particular is full of words which don’t really mean anything at all, e.g. human , living , or romantic . ‘Fascism’, too, has lost all meaning in current political writing, effectively meaning ‘something not desirable’ (one wonders what Orwell would make of the word’s misuse in our current time!).

To prove his point, Orwell ‘translates’ a well-known passage from the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes into modern English, with all its vagueness of language. ‘The whole tendency of modern prose’, he argues, ‘is away from concreteness.’ He draws attention to the concrete and everyday images (e.g. references to bread and riches) in the Bible passage, and the lack of any such images in his own fabricated rewriting of this passage.

The problem, Orwell says, is that it is too easy (and too tempting) to reach for these off-the-peg phrases than to be more direct or more original and precise in one’s speech or writing.

Orwell advises every writer to ask themselves four questions (at least): 1) what am I trying to say? 2) what words will express it? 3) what image or idiom will make it clearer? and 4) is this image fresh enough to have an effect? He proposes two further optional questions: could I put it more shortly? and have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

Orthodoxy, Orwell goes on to observe, tends to encourage this ‘lifeless, imitative style’, whereas rebels who are not parroting the ‘party line’ will normally write in a more clear and direct style.

But Orwell also argues that such obfuscating language serves a purpose: much political writing is an attempt to defend the indefensible, such as the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan (just one year before Orwell wrote ‘Politics and the English Language’), in such a euphemistic way that the ordinary reader will find it more palatable.

When your aim is to make such atrocities excusable, language which doesn’t evoke any clear mental image (e.g. of burning bodies in Hiroshima) is actually desirable.

Orwell argues that just as thought corrupts language, language can corrupt thought, with these ready-made phrases preventing writers from expressing anything meaningful or original. He believes that we should get rid of any word which has outworn its usefulness and should aim to use ‘the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning’.

Writers should let the meaning choose the word, rather than vice versa. We should think carefully about what we want to say until we have the right mental pictures to convey that thought in the clearest language.

Orwell concludes ‘Politics and the English Language’ with six rules for the writer to follow:

i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

‘Politics and the English Language’: analysis

In some respects, ‘Politics and the English Language’ advances an argument about good prose language which is close to what the modernist poet and thinker T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) argued for poetry in his ‘ A Lecture on Modern Poetry ’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’ almost forty years earlier.

Although Hulme and Orwell came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, their objections to lazy and worn-out language stem are in many ways the same.

Hulme argued that poetry should be a forge where fresh metaphors are made: images which make us see the world in a slightly new way. But poetic language decays into common prose language before dying a lingering death in journalists’ English. The first time a poet described a hill as being ‘clad [i.e. clothed] with trees’, the reader would probably have mentally pictured such an image, but in time it loses its power to make us see anything.

Hulme calls these worn-out expressions ‘counters’, because they are like discs being moved around on a chessboard: an image which is itself not unlike Orwell’s prefabricated hen-house in ‘Politics and the English Language’.

Of course, Orwell’s focus is English prose rather than poetry, and his objections to sloppy writing are not principally literary (although that is undoubtedly a factor) but, above all, political. And he is keen to emphasise that his criticism of bad language, and suggestions for how to improve political writing, are both, to an extent, hopelessly idealistic: as he observes towards the end of ‘Politics and the English Language’, ‘Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.’

But what Orwell advises is that the writer be on their guard against such phrases, the better to avoid them where possible. This is why he encourages writers to be more self-questioning (‘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?’) when writing political prose.

Nevertheless, the link between the standard of language and the kind of politics a particular country, regime, or historical era has is an important one. As Orwell writes: ‘I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.’

Those writing under a dictatorship cannot write or speak freely, of course, but more importantly, those defending totalitarian rule must bend and abuse language in order to make ugly truths sound more attractive to the general populace, and perhaps to other nations.

In more recent times, the phrase ‘collateral damage’ is one of the more objectionable phrases used about war, hiding the often ugly reality (innocent civilians who are unfortunate victims of violence, but who are somehow viewed as a justifiable price to pay for the greater good).

Although Orwell’s essay has been criticised for being too idealistic, in many ways ‘Politics and the English Language’ remains as relevant now as it was in 1946 when it was first published.

Indeed, to return to Orwell’s opening point about decadence, it is unavoidable that the standard of political discourse has further declined since Orwell’s day. Perhaps it’s time a few more influential writers started heeding his argument?

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9 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’”

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YES! Thank you!

A great and useful post. As a writer, I have been seriously offended by the politicization of the language in the past 50 years. Much of this is supposedly to sanitize, de-genderize, or diversity-fie language – exactly as it’s done in Orwell’s “1984.” How did a wonderfully useful word like gay – cheerful or lively – come to mean homosexual? And is optics not a branch of physics? Ironically, when the liberal but sensible JK Rowling criticized the replacement of “woman” with “person who menstruates” SHE was the one attacked. Now, God help us, we hope “crude” spaceships will get humans to Mars – which, if you research the poor quality control in Tesla cars, might in fact be a proper term.

And less anyone out there misread, this or me – I was a civil rights marcher, taught in a girls’ high school (where I got in minor trouble for suggesting to the students that they should aim higher than the traditional jobs of nurse or teacher), and – while somewhat of a mugwump – consider myself a liberal.

But I will fight to keep the language and the history from being 1984ed.

My desert island book would be the Everyman Essays of Orwell which is around 1200 pages. I’ve read it all the way through twice without fatigue and read individual essays endlessly. His warmth and affability help, Even better than Montaigne in this heretic’s view.

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I’ll go against the flow here and say Orwell was – at least in part – quite wrong here. If I recall correctly, he was wrong about a few things including, I think, the right way to make a cup of tea! In all seriousness, what he fails to acknowledge in this essay is that language is a living thing and belongs to the people, not the theorists, at all time. If a metaphor changes because of homophone mix up or whatever, then so be it. Many of our expressions we have little idea of now – I think of ‘baited breath’ which almost no one, even those who know how it should be spelt, realise should be ‘abated breath’.

Worse than this though, his ‘rules’ have indeed been taken up by many would-be writers to horrifying effect. I recall learning to make up new metaphors and similes rather than use clichés when I first began training ten years ago or more. I saw some ghastly new metaphors over time which swiftly made me realise that there’s a reason we use the same expressions a great deal and that is they are familiar and do the job well. To look at how to use them badly, just try reading Gregory David Roberts ‘Shantaram’. Similarly, the use of active voice has led to unpalatable writing which lacks character. The passive voice may well become longwinded when badly used, but it brings character when used well.

That said, Orwell is rarely completely wrong. Some of his points – essentially, use words you actually understand and don’t be pretentious – are valid. But the idea of the degradation of politics is really quite a bit of nonsense!

Always good to get some critique of Orwell, Ken! And I do wonder how tongue-in-cheek he was when proposing his guidelines – after all, even he admits he’s probably broken several of his own rules in the course of his essay! I think I’m more in the T. E. Hulme camp than the Orwell – poetry can afford to bend language in new ways (indeed, it often should do just this), and create daring new metaphors and ways of viewing the world. But prose, especially political non-fiction, is there to communicate an argument or position, and I agree that ghastly new metaphors would just get in the way. One of the things that is refreshing reading Orwell is how many of the problems he identified are still being discussed today, often as if they are new problems that didn’t exist a few decades ago. Orwell shows that at least one person was already discussing them over half a century ago!

Absolutely true! When you have someone of Orwell’s intelligence and clear thinking, even when you believe him wrong or misguided, he is still relevant and remains so decades later.

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Politics and the English Language

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1946

Plot Summary

George Orwell’s essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946) is a critique of the conventions of written English in the modernist and post-World War II era, focusing specifically on the correlation between political correctness and intellectual and linguistic poverty. Orwell lambasts people who use language as a tool to obfuscate, rather than convey, truth, arguing that language, though political, should never be weaponized with the intent to exploit vulnerable readers. Moreover, he remarks that such a use of language masks truth even from the one who thinks of and deploys it. The essay is well known for being an unusually literal and didactic departure from Orwell’s usual subject matter, which employs extended metaphors that refer to economic and class issues. The essay appears in the essay collection, Why I Write . Read further analysis of "Politics and the English Language" in the SuperSummary Study Guide for Why I Write .

Orwell relates what he sees as a direct correlation between bad writing and oppressive thought. He characterizes virtually all contemporary political speech and political prose as written to defend, minimize, or obfuscate atrocities and blatant inequities occurring in society. He gives the examples of continued British colonization of India on both political and ideological lines, as well as Russian deportations of Jews and dissenting figures, and the United States’ decision to decimate Hiroshima with an atom bomb. Though these actions, like any action, can be defended, the arguments that they necessitate require language that is too harsh for public consumption and conflicts with the professed aims of the political parties who wish to advocate for them. As a result, political language now relies mainly on minimizing language to euphemisms and deliberate vagueness. For example, the violent seizure of an enemy town might be termed “pacification,” while driving citizens from their homelands in mass deportations might be called a “transfer of population.” Orwell traces this linguistic phenomenon to the fact that vague language prevents one’s audience from coming to immediate terms with the often-violent realities that are its referents.

Next, Orwell posits that insincerity is inimical to clarity of thought and language. Whenever there is a lacuna between a writer or speaker’s real and stated goals, the writer resorts to overly complex or grandiose language and overused idioms . He employs the simile of a cuttlefish spurting out ink to elude its foe. When writers, the supposed champions and representatives of their audience’s conception of language’s abilities and ends, disguise their points in strange diction, they perpetuate the ideologies of doublethink and euphemism. This kicks off a vicious cycle where language perpetually declines as language users resort to simpler and simpler words and phrasings. He compares this to the pathology of the alcoholic, who usually begins drinking excessively because he already feels like a failure. As he continues to drink, he ensures his failure, instigating his own fulfillment of this destructive attribution.

Orwell points out two more devices that insincere writers use. One is pretentious diction; that is, the use of overly complex or academic words to express biased viewpoints as if they were scientific and unbiased. The other is meaningless diction, the substitution of filler words where real arguments should be to exhaust the reader’s attention before reaching the crux of an argument. He states that these habits spread mainly by imitation, creating a kind of linguistic virus that propagates through various media. He argues that it behooves writers to help their audience think more clearly by themselves thinking more clearly and producing lucid writing that matches the content of their imaginations.

Orwell concludes with a list of six rules that form a simple and finite axiomatic program to generate compelling and lucid writing. He poses the list as a remedy to the constant temptation to deploy meaningless diction, which always threatens to arrest and stifle the intellectual potential of the writer. The first rule is to never use a simile, metaphor, or any other figure of speech that one has already seen frequently used in other texts. He calls these “dying metaphors,” asserting that they are generally used when a writer doesn’t actually know what he or she means. Additionally, because of their vagueness and overuse, they are highly susceptible to manipulation in meaning. The second rule is to never use a longer word when a short word suffices as a unit of meaning. The third is to remove excess words that do not advance the argument or image under consideration. The fourth is to avoid passive voice . The fifth is to avoid using foreign, scientific, or overly dialectical words when there is an ordinary equivalent in a given language. The sixth and final rule is Orwell’s exhortation to willingly break these rules if it prevents one from saying something “barbarous.” Orwell ends his essay on a slightly optimistic note, arguing that the decline of the English language is reversible, and can be enacted by following rules such as the ones he has laid out.

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Politics and the English Language

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the permission of the Orwell Estate . If you value these resources, please consider making a donation or joining us as a Friend to help maintain them for readers everywhere. 

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad – I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen – but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, 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 ). 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 ( Interglossia ). 3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? Essay on psychology in Politics (New York). 4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic Fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. Communist pamphlet. 5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens! Letter in Tribune .

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as 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 and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

Dying metaphors . A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution ) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these 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 are: Ring the changes on , take up the cudgels for , toe the line , ride roughshod over , stand shoulder to shoulder with , play into the hands of , no axe to grind , grist to the mill , fishing in troubled waters , on the order of the day , Achilles’ heel , swan song , hotbed . Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line . 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.

Operators, or verbal false limbs . These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative , militate against , prove unacceptable , make contact with , be subject to , give rise to , give grounds for , have the effect of , play a leading part ( role ) in , make itself felt , take effect , exhibit a tendency to , serve the purpose of , etc. etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break , stop , spoil , mend , kill , a verb becomes a phrase , made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove , serve , form , play , render . In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds ( by examination of instead of by examining ). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to , having regard to , the fact that , by dint of , in view of , in the interests of , on the hypothesis that ; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired , cannot be left out of account , a development to be expected in the near future , deserving of serious consideration , brought to a satisfactory conclusion , and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction . Words like phenomenon , element , individual (as noun), objective , categorical , effective , virtual , basic , primary , promote , constitute , exhibit , exploit , utilize , eliminate , liquidate , are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making , epic , historic , unforgettable , triumphant , age-old , inevitable , inexorable , veritable , are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm , throne , chariot , mailed fist , trident , sword , shield , buckler , banner , jackboot , clarion . Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac , ancien régime , deus ex machina , mutatis mutandis , status quo , Gleichschaltung , Weltanschauung , are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e ., e.g. , and etc. , there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite , ameliorate , predict , extraneous , deracinated , clandestine , sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers[1]. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing ( hyena , hangman , cannibal , petty bourgeois , these gentry , lackey , flunkey , mad dog , White Guard , etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind ( deregionalize , impermissible , extramarital , non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words . In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning[2]. Words like romantic , plastic , values , human , dead , sentimental , natural , vitality , as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. 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. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living , he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy , socialism , freedom , patriotic , realistic , justice , have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy , not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot , The Soviet press is the freest in the world , The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution , are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class , totalitarian , science , progressive , reactionary , bourgeois , equality .

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. 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. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes :

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, 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.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels 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 taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit 3 above, for instance, 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 fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing – no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective’ consideration of contemporary phenomena’ – would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyse these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes .

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think . If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry – when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech – it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash – as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song , the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot – it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with , is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4) the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink. In (5) words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning – they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another – but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. 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.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities , iron heel , blood-stained tyranny , free peoples of the world , stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification . Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers . 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 . Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. 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. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption , leaves much to be desired , would serve no good purpose , a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind , are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see: ‘(The Allies) have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write – feels, presumably, that he has something new to say – and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases ( lay the foundations , achieve a radical transformation ) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned , which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. 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[3], 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. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it 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. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. 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 – some jackboot , Achilles’ heel , hotbed , melting pot , acid test , veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

Horizon, April 1946

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Politics and the English Language

By george orwell, politics and the english language study guide.

Fittingly, George Orwell 's essay “ Politics and the English Language ” is accurately described by its title. The essay is about the connection between politics and poor uses of language. It presents an argument for clear, simple, unpretentious language that attempts to represent its meaning—hence the unambiguous title.

The essay is not, as it might at first glance appear, a defense of archaic or traditionally “proper” uses of English. On the contrary, Orwell feels that old, dead words should be abandoned, as he argues for original and independent thinking that comes from asserting agency in language—specifically in political speech. One of his main arguments is that repetitions derive from unoriginal thinking and unoriginal thinking leads to repetitions. He describes a form of indoctrination that happens when people use familiar turns of phrase in political speech. Rather than thinking independently, people pantomime a party line.

Along with hackneyed phrases and meaningless redundancies, abstract or elevated political language is one of his main targets. He demonstrates in clear terms the way that abstract language is a form of lying: namely, when the language used to describe a party’s political agenda is far removed from the violence for which it apologizes.

The essay’s thesis is an evolving one, ultimately aiming to debunk the idea that there’s no hope in resisting the intellectually corrosive effects of political speech, nor the lies produced by highly abstract language for political purpose. He offers a helpful toolkit for the political writer to use in order to resist being indoctrinated by language.

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Politics and English language

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the...

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Study Guide for Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language study guide contains a biography of George Orwell, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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• Introduction

George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language: Summary and Analysis

Table of Contents

George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language

George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language raises somewhat similar concerns as his ‘1984’. It is one of his most famous essays written about the decay of language and its use  to conceal political sins. It raises concerns regarding the spreading decay of language whose roots lie somewhere in politics.  He compares the decay with a chain reaction. Every other writer was feeling bound to be a part of the chain. The author provides five examples to demonstrate how loss of purpose and clarity has infected language. Orwell notes that the thing runs like an infection and spreads  far and wide through imitation only for people are not interested in taking the necessary trouble. However, the process according to him is reversible.  In these five paragraphs he had selected, Orwell highlights how stale imagery and lack of precision have made language become deficient in purpose. He highlights some specific problems like dying metaphors and pretentious diction which have corrupted language and if thoughts can corrupt language, frivolous language too can corrupt thoughts and the problem can spread farther and farther.

In the initial paragraph the author expresses his concern over the poor state of English language and while some people are concerned with it, they too assume that nothing can be done about it. The argument such people offer is that if the society is decaying, language too will.  The problem Orwell notes is that any struggle against this decay is considered sentimental archaism or the imitation of antiquated forms of speech because of an old love for them. It is considered a fight against progress and change. However, change must not come at the loss of originality and meaning. Orwell considers that a frightful loss of meaning is happening because of such poor experimentations. People also believe that language has evolved naturally and is not shaped and used by us to suit our own purposes. It is a tool you use to communicate ideas and the way you use it affects the meaning. This decay has political and economic causes and is not the bad influence of an individual writer, he notes. He then explains how the chain reaction happens. The effect becomes the cause, intensifying the effect further and the reaction continues indefinitely. A man fails and gets drunk and then keeps failing because of getting into this poor habit. Something similar is happening to English and not because poor writers employ foolish ideas but because unkempt English language makes it easier for them to have foolish thoughts.

Orwell might very well be indicating towards the use of English to gain cheap success and publicity or to achieve other nefarious ends. Modern English has grown contaminated due to such bad habits and if they could be avoided, people will be able to think clearly. This is a necessary first step towards ‘political regeneration’.  The way they had been using language to conceal the biggest political sins had led to a very high level of degeneration. Orwell wanted that the struggle against poor English did not remain the exclusive concern of professional writers. He highlights five sample passages that are representative of these poor habits. While there were worse samples available, he chose these specifically because they were fairly representative of the problems he was trying to highlight. The main problems apart from the ugliness which could have been avoided with some attention, Orwell notes there are two – staleness of imagery and lack of precision.

What is notably black about these passages is that the writer is not concerned at all for meaning.  Orwell notes that either these writers lack a sense of meaning or they are unable to express it or they are not at all concerned with what their words mean. This is both vague and incompetent writing and these are the most remarkable characteristics of the modern English prose and it is especially true about political writing. Orwell is again concerned for the lack of originality and compares these passages with a pre-planned henhouse. These writers stack words together with no concern for meaning to construct a meaningless mess akin to a henhouse or a sty. He notes some of the techniques commonly used by these writers. These are four of his most notable criticisms made against modern prose and especially political writing.

Dying metaphors:

There are newly invented metaphors and there are dead metaphors. The newly invented ones evoke a visual image while a technically dead metaphor has become ordinary and can be used without loss of vividness. Between these two classes there is another class of worn out or dying metaphors. These metaphors are the ones that have lost their power to evoke an image and are used because they can save people the trouble to invent new phrases for themselves. Orwell cites several examples for such metaphors like Achilles’ Heel, Swan Song, no axe to grind, toe the line etc. Many times writers use incompatible ones together which reflects their lack of interest in creating something meaningful and coherent. Some metaphors are being used in a way that their original meaning is lost and the writer is unaware of this fact. This he calls perverted use of the original phrase. For example, in case of ‘hammer and the anvil’, now the implication is always that the anvil gets the worst of it. In reality, it is just the opposite and writers should stop twisting the meaning of the original phrase. The author is referring to soulless prose which had become the norm in political writing. 

Operators or Verbal False limbs:

Operators do away with the need to select nouns and verbs and create an appearance of symmetry by padding each sentence with extra syllables. Some of the key phrases include r ender inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable etc. A noun or an adjective is attached to a verb to create such false limbs. A verb like prove, render, play, form etc stops being a single word. Moreover, passive voice is given preference over active voice and noun constructions instead of gerunds. – ise, – de and – un formations are also used to twist language. Phrases like by dint of and in view of are being used to replace the prepositions and conjunctions and to prevent an anticlimax at the end of sentences, they are using resounding commonplaces like as greatly to be desired and deserving of serious consideration and so on. Orwell has highlighted a major discrepancy. This was critical neglect and if carried on further would lead to even more meaninglessness.

Pretentious diction:

By pretentious diction, the author means use of words, phenomenon, element etc to dress simple sentences and create an impression of scientific impartiality in biased judgements. Use of adjectives like age old and triumphant to dignify immoral processes in world politics has become common. Moreover, writers use words like realm, throne, chariot etc to glorify war. Similarly, foreign words are used in plenty to create an air of culture and elegance. Such mindless injection of foreign words into English bothered Orwell. Such bad writers abound in the sphere of sociology, politics and science who believe that the Latin and Greek words are better than Saxon and it is why hundreds of Saxon words have been replaced by Latin and Greek words. Marxist writing has borrowed from Russian and German or French while the normal way of coining a new word is to use the Latin or Greek word with an appropriate affix and if necessary  –  ise formation. It is generally easier for writers to create new combinations than seek the right English words and what it results into is loss of meaning. Orwell suggest such writers should not write than produce messed content.

Meaningless words:

In art and literary criticism, it is quite common to come against long passages that are absolutely lacking in meaning. The reader is being forced to digest such passages without being aware of the mistakes being committed. Such words, as are common in art criticism, like romantic, plastic, human, dead etc are strictly meaningless because of their inability to point towards any discoverable object.  What readers often take as a simple difference of view is most often an improper use of language. Several such political words like fascism have grown meaningless out of abuse. Similarly, words like democracy and freedom have several meanings and this allows for deception. Statements like The Soviet Press is the freest in the world are meant to deceive. There are other words too which are most often used dishonestly to deceive people like class, progressive and totalitarian.

Next, he translates a passage from Ecclesiastes to modern English to show how meaning gets altered  or nearly lost due to improper use of language.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, 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.

The translation runs something like this

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels 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 taken into account.

In this way, he showed how sentences had lost their concreteness in modern English prose and despite its plentiful use of words that are rooted in Latin and Greek, the translation does not deliver half the meaning as the original. This type of English is easier to write and that’s where its attractiveness lies. Orwell calls it the use of readymade phrases where you do not need to bother for rhythm since these phrases are arranged in a manner to seem musical.  However, such pretentious Latinized style is easier to fall for if you are in a hurry. While the meaning is left vague, one is also able to avid the labor through the use of such stale metaphors, idioms and similes. In the first of the 5 examples he had cited of clumsy passages there were some nonsense usage, avoidable clumsiness adding to the overall sloppiness. He clarifies the case with these clumsy passages that people writing in such a manner are trying to make the case about one thing and without being interested in the detail of what he is saying. At last, Orwell is pointing that All that glitters in English language is not pure gold. Writers have continued to mix it with cheaper metals to make it look stronger. Adulteration is resulting in dilution of meaning and a lack of soul and voice.

There are simple four or five questions Orwell suggests that a serious writer must ask of himself when writing.

• What he is trying to say?
• What words will express it best?
• What image or idiom will make the picture clear?
• Is this image fresh enough to affect?
• Could he say it in less words?
• Is there something ugly that can be avoided?

Otherwise you can avoid all this exercise and open your mind to readymade phrases that will conceal the meaning not just from your readers but from you as well. You might better write while you sleep.

Orwell now turns to political writing which roughly according to him is bad writing. Generally the political writer is some form of rebel who is expressing his own opinions rather than pursuing some party line. Orthodoxy does not leave space for originality and instead demands a style that is far more imitative and lifeless.  So the readymade phrases abound everywhere in political language from pamphlets to speeches. When a dummy speaks from some platform, he repeats these phrases mechanically. One cannot try to find anything homelike or original in his speech. Not just this, in order to pursue such mechanical jargon, the speaker has gone to some extent to become a machine and speak something that feels like being spoken by a robot. The speaker looks like talking into the microphone with no clear idea of what he is talking about. These are just noises coming out of his throat because he has grown so unconscious to what he is speaking and become habituated to just like the responses people utter in Church. He is more of a programmed machine carrying out his task of speaking and if one tries to note the purpose and meaning behind his speech, he will find nothing worth remembering there. Orwell calls it political conformity or following the norm of the group. He notes that language is being used to defend the most indefensible sins like the continuance of British rule in India, dropping of bombs on Japan, purges in Russia and similar deformities that do not agree with what these political parties vouch. The political phraseology is being used to conceal the biggest sins committed against humanity like robbing of peasants and machine gunning of cattle. Orwell cites the example of an English professor trying to defend Russian totalitarianism with euphemism. He uses a mass of latin words to cover the facts and details.

Insincerity is a great enemy of clarity and when one’s real and declared purposes differ, he reverts to the use of long words and exhausted idioms that Orwell compares with ‘Cuttlefish squirting ink’. He connects language with politics to show how moral degradation in politics has led to degradation of language. Politics has become a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. No one can keep out of politics and since the general atmosphere has grown bad, there is no chance of language remaining untouched. He expected German, Russian and Italian languages to have suffered a similar damage because of political dictatorship. Moreover, he adds if thoughts can corrupt language then language also has the potential to corrupt thought. Bad usage spread by tradition and imitation and even the people who could have otherwise known better get touched by it and feel bound to imitate. Such language, while it is very comfortable to use and gives rise to a continuous temptation for repeated use, it becomes as convenient as the aspirin always within your reach.

Towards the end, Orwell offers a cure for such decadence that language has become. People who deny this, often state that language merely reflects existing social norms and it cannot be affected directly by tinkering with words. This is true but only to a limited extent. Silly words and expressions have most often disappeared from English not just as a part of evolution of language but because of conscious action by a minority. The author cites two examples of ‘leaving no stone unturned’ and ‘explore every avenue’.  A similar long list of metaphors could be done away with if people worked on it consciously and drove out those stray scientific words and Greek and Latin which had populated English. In this way they could get rid of pretentious writing by making it unfashionable.  However, to save English would need more than just this.

To start with, it is not archaism as we are not fighting to set a standard in English which must not be deviated from or trying to save some obsolete words or turns of speech. On the contrary, the concern is to remove the words or phrases that have outlived their usefulness and by avoiding Americanism. It is neither concerned with fake simplicity or with making English colloquial. Neither is it concerned with always preferring the Saxon over Latin but it is concerned with using fewer and shorter words to express yourself. One must not surrender his meaning to his choice of words but instead choose words according to the meaning.   To evoke the right images, one should put off the use of words till the last moment and first sensationalize and picturize and afterwards choose the words accordingly. This will help to remove the stale images and clumsiness. Orwell gave some rules that could very well be applied in most cases.

• Do not use a metaphor, simile or figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.
• Do not use a long word where a short one can do.
• Cut a word out if it is possible to.
• Do not use passive where you can use active.
• Do not use a foreign phrase or a scientific word or jargon if you can think of an English substitute.
• However, if you feel like you are going to say something barbarous break any of these rules freely.

One would require a deep change of attitude even if one wants to adopt these elementary rules. However, one can write bad English even after having adopted these but that will still be better than the five passages that Orwell has quoted in his essay. He too emphasizes simplicity and that if you are ready to simplify, you can avoid the biggest follies that orthodoxy could have made you commit. Political language is designed to speak lies and to make murder look respectful. These frivolous and worn out phrases must be sent out into the dustbin. If one cannot change everything in a day, one can at least change his own habit. Orwell has written in detail about how English has decayed with decaying politics and to stop this decay one would need to get rid of several bad habits, one of which  is to get rid of the readymade phrases which may make your language seem fashionable but will conceal meaning or prevent any effect. The punch in Orwell’s essay is inescapable. The essay alarms us against escaping the standards of written English because it gives rise to a gap that makes meaning suffer.

You can read the complete text of the essay using following link –

https://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDLPS579/HonorsOrwellPoliticsEnglishLanguage.pdf

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The Danger of Intellectual Laziness

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell ’s central point is that bad writing produces bad politics. According to Orwell, a culture full of lazily written nonsense enables governments to control citizens through deceptive messaging. This is because lazy writing leads to lazy thinking—or, rather, to a lack of critical thinking about the messages one receives. To get from bad writing to bad politics, Orwell draws a line from laziness, to nonsensical…

Style as a Political Issue

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell pays careful attention to style—that is, how a person says something: the tone, syntax, flow of sentences, metaphors, and choice of words. He argues that the style in which people communicate determines the degree to which their governments can pass off lies as truths. In doing so, Orwell attempts to convince a politically minded audience that the specific way people express themselves—that is, their language itself—is inseparable from…

Honesty, Truth, and Concision

In addition to arguing against linguistic laziness, Orwell argues specifically for a writing process that encourages concision—that is, using as few words as possible to get a point across. Indeed, two of his proposed rules for good writing include: “Never use a long word where a short one will do,” and “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” Underlining this argument is the idea that reality or facts (or…

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Mercer Street

Essays from the expository writing program at new york university, orwell, trump, and twitter: reexamining the relationship between politics and language, by melissa bo-ya feng.

In 1946, George Orwell declared that the English language was declining. His six rules for writing have persisted over the decades, encouraging students like me to write concisely and sincerely. With the advancement of modern science and technology, politics, communication, and the English language have all undergone a series of revolutionary changes. Social media platforms like Twitter play an increasingly important role in daily life. Some political leaders, most notably Donald Trump, have used Twitter to communicate with masses of people. Does the rise of Twitter call Orwell’s arguments about the connection between politics and the English language into question?

Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” examines the connection between politics and modern English, criticizing contemporary prose for being too vague, too lengthy, and too convoluted. To combat this decline, Orwell advocates for a more direct style of writing. He begins by examining the weaknesses of modern English writing, pointing out that “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits,” especially “the mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence,” which have been “spread by imitation” (165). To unlearn these “bad habits,” writers should think more clearly, as this is “a necessary first step toward political regeneration” (163). He analyzes four representative examples, identifying their common qualities: “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision” (165). Each of the passages he includes use convoluted language, thus obscuring their intentions and ideas. In order to make his point more convincing, Orwell translates a vivid passage from Ecclesiastes into modern English. The original version is clear and comprehensible, using precise words and specific images, while the translated version is complicated by redundant language and wordy sentences. Based on his analyses, Orwell concludes, “The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness” (175). Thus emerges the connection between modern English prose and the development of politics: modern English can allow people to conceal their intentions.

Orwell argues that politics plays a significant but reversible role in the decline of the English language. He explains why political language is filled with “euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness” (173). Politicians often defend indefensible issues; for example, they might call bombarding defenseless villages and harming innocent civilians “pacification” (173). In order to conceal the violence of their actions, politicians express themselves euphemistically. ‘Pacification’ connotes neutrality, masking the cruelty of war. Orwell then posits, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” warning readers that corrupt thoughts and convoluted language mutually reinforce one another (173). If politicians want to conceal reality, they use complicated and imprecise language. In addition, when ambiguous and indirect writing are imitated and spread, they corrupt people’s thinking. Orwell believes the decay of both language and politics can be undone, however, presenting six rules to cure the problems with modern prose:

• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (176)

Applying these rules to English prose—particularly to political prose—allows writers to express their intentions clearly and present their ideas concisely. As a result, concealment, corruption, and vagueness—in politics and beyond—can be reduced. More importantly, politicians have to think more critically about their choices and be more straightforward about their intentions. Orwell’s essay is constructive and convincing, giving people the means not only to improve their writing but also to improve society. However, doesn’t Donald Trump’s rise to power by communicating through social media challenge some of Orwell’s ideas? 

In his Financial Times article “Why Donald Trump Is Proving George Orwell Wrong” Simon Kuper illustrates how Trump’s communication style refutes Orwell’s central ideas about the value of concise writing. Kuper opens with an anecdote about Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , explaining that it became a bestseller again as “a defence of truth . . . in the Trumpian era of ‘alternative facts.’” Before the “Trumpian era,” Kuper wholeheartedly believed in Orwell’s ideas. He calls himself “an Orwell nut,” noting that he could recite passages from Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” by heart. As Trump rose to power by way of social media, however, Kuper began to question Orwell’s arguments. While Orwell argues that “clear speech enables clear thought and prevents lies,” Donald Trump’s words suggested to Kuper that “clear speech can enable lies.” According to Kuper, Trump follows five of Orwell’s six rules but also applies “huckster’s utopianism” to writing, “a rhetorical genre that Orwell didn’t have.” A “huckster” is someone who sells or advertises something in an aggressive, dishonest, or annoying way, and “utopianism” refers to a social or political idea that is impractically ideal (Merriam-Webster.com). In other words, Trump uses Orwell’s rules for directness and sincerity but to brag, show off, and promote dishonest  and unrealistic ideas. Communication is extremely important for politicians in the current political sphere, and, according to Kuper, Trump understands “the rules of communication: the audience is bored before you’ve even said anything; style trumps substance; and facts don’t persuade people.” For instance, Trump simplifies complicated international relations into simple sentences like “The Iran deal is a disaster” (qtd. in Kuper 2). This language sets up a simple equation for readers (Iran = bad), proving that “simple language can encourage simple thought”—quite a shift from Orwell’s point that “clear language enables clear thought.” Trump’s concise style influences people’s thoughts and even makes lies sound like truth, but it does not encourage deeper thinking about current issues.

Orwell fails to consider that public figures can use concise language to communicate insincere ideas more persuasively. People can easily understand an uncomplicated sentence without the need to think about it deeply. Simple language, like Trump’s, inspires automatic thought. Trump’s ability to use concise language to lie more convincingly represents a possibility Orwell never considered. Moreover, with the development of technology, social media has become a powerful mode of communication. A post can be viewed by millions of people in a minute. Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms, with 330 million active users a month (Lin). Donald Trump is an avid Twitter user, who recognized himself as “the Best 140 Character Writer in the World” (Trump 2012).  With social media, he can mislead many people with a single post. Now, in Trump’s tweets, corrupt thoughts and clear language mutually reinforce each other.

Twitter requires that its users share posts that are no more than 280 characters each (the platform doubled its original 140-character limit in 2017), which forces people to be concise. In theory, Orwell would prefer this limitation, as he believes concise, explicit language helps people to think clearly. During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump posted a cumulative total of 7,627 tweets in 512 days (Kayam 157). Because a tweet must be brief, users often include hyperlinks, abbreviations, and other forms of simplification in their posts. However, some simplification tactics may distract people and complicate the post. Anyone who doesn’t understand an abbreviation, for example, will need to look it up. In Trump’s tweets, he often inserts hyperlinks and tags and writes simple, exaggerated sentences to express his intense opinions. The logic of a complex thought is also inevitably simplified in a tweet, which may cause misunderstandings. Thus, writing concisely may not encourage the clarity and comprehensibility that Orwell imagined, especially when it comes to politics. Political issues are often very sophisticated, and politicians cannot explain complex issues in only 280 characters, even with the most concise sentences. 

In addition, posting a tweet requires little thought or effort, which means that posts often become more emotional than rational. In his article “The Age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of Debasement,” Brian Ott analyzes Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. Ott identifies three key features of Twitter: “simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility” (60). Ott also writes that people find it “easier to say something nasty about someone when they are not physically present” (62). Trump’s posts on Twitter confirm Ott’s three characteristics: they are simple, impulsive, and uncivil. A 2020 statistical analysis of Trump’s tweets reveals that 22.8% are directed against political opponents, 22.7% contain slogans such as “Make American Great Again,” and 47.4% are negative, with content that is directed against something or someone (Kayam 160). In its ideal form, politics is constructive and sincere, rational rather than impulsive, and built on civility. While Twitter encourages concision through its character limit, it does not encourage clarity, rationality, or civility, as Orwell might have hoped. Instead, people may use Twitter primarily to share irrational and inconsiderate thoughts.

As society has made great technological leaps since 1946, George Orwell’s ideas about politics and modern English might no longer apply. With the advent of social media, most people now digest language and content much more quickly as there is so much information online. In fact, a year after Twitter doubled this limit, only 12% of tweets exceeded 140 characters, indicating that concision still rules the platform (Perez). As a result, we may not reflect deeply on the words we read. Rather, we perceive the meaning of words superficially. Though Orwell would have imagined that the character limit Twitter imposes would remind us to only post after careful consideration, the accessibility of social media actually encourages us to post as Trump does—impulsively, irrationally, and uncivilly. Trump’s use of Twitter alters Orwell’s ideas, placings Orwell’s six rules for writing on the verge of extinction.

Works Cited

“Huckster.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, merriam-webster.com/dictionary/huckster . Accessed 12 October 2020.

Kayam, Orly. “Straight to the People: Donald Trump’s Rhetorical Style on Twitter in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Language and Dialogue , vol. 10, no. 2, Sept. 2020, pp. 149-70.

Kuper, Simon. “Why Donald Trump Is proving George Orwell Wrong.” The Financial Times Limited , 16 Jan. 2020, ft.com/content/fadd0da0-372e-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4 .

Lin, Ying. “10 Twitter Statistics Every Marketer Should Know in 2020.” Oberlo , 13 Oct. 2020, oberlo.com/blog/twitter-statistics . 

Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” A Collection of Essays , Anchor Books, 1954, pp. 162-185.

Ott, Brian L. “The age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the politics of debasement.”  Critical Studies in Media Communication , Jan. 2017, pp. 59-67.

Perez, Sarah. “Twitter’s Doubling of Character Count from 140 to 280 Had Little Impact on Length of Tweets.” TechCrunch , 30 Oct. 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/twitters-doubling-of-character-count-from-140-to-280-had-little-impact-on-length-of-tweets/ .

@realDonaldTrump. “Thanks- Many Are Saying I’m the Best 140 Character Writer in the World. It’s Easy When It’s Fun.” Twitter , 10 Nov. 2012, 7:23 a.m., https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/267286471172562944 . 

“Utopianism.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, merriam-webster.com/dictionary/utopianism . Accessed 12 October 2020.

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If I asked you to name a historical figure who manages to be both incredibly well-known and universally misunderstood, who comes to mind?

Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche are obvious candidates. But any list like this has to include George Orwell, the English essayist and the author of two of the most famous political novels of the 20th century: 1984 and Animal Farm .

Whether you’ve read any of Orwell’s work or not, you’ve no doubt heard the term “Orwellian” used to describe people and events that are very likely contradictory, which of course is part of the problem with Orwell. He’s been stretched so much that his name is now a floating signifier that conveys just enough information to suggest something vaguely meaningful but not enough information to truly clarify anything.

The supreme irony here is that Orwell’s greatest virtue as a writer was his directness and clarity. He wrote so as not to be misunderstood, and yet he is now perpetually misunderstood. How did that happen? And how should we understand Orwell? 

Laura Beers is a historian at American University and the author of a new book called Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century . This is an intellectual biography but it is not, to its credit, a hagiography. Beers takes an honest look at Orwell’s life — the best and the worst of it — and presents a three-dimensional picture.

So I invited Beers on The Gray Area to talk about who Orwell was, his complicated legacy, and how he speaks to this political moment. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Pandora , or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

Orwell said that one of his great strengths was his “power of facing unpleasant facts.” That’s such an interesting phrase, especially the use of the word “power.” What did he mean by that?

Laura Beers

Well, Orwell is writing in the context of the late 1930s, when the left in Britain and across the West felt this need to defend the Soviet Union. And Orwell was in the awkward position of someone who identified throughout his career as a socialist, but who was very clear-eyed about the abuses of Stalinist totalitarianism and was unwilling to toe the general party line in Western Europe by socialists who were very defensive of Stalinist Russia.

For him, this power of facing unpleasant facts is partially a willingness to stand up to most of his colleagues within the political left in Western Europe and call them out for their support of the Soviet Union, and say that we can’t be afraid that it will undermine the cause of socialism to talk about the abuses of power of this ostensibly socialist society in Russia. And that, if we are going to attain a better tomorrow, we have to be honest about the mistakes and missteps on our own side as well as critiquing capitalism and critiquing fascism, and he was a vocal critic of both.

What would you say is the prime value of reading Orwell today?

The things that really concerned Orwell, and you can really see them in his final two novels, are the accretion of state power and the accretion of media power so that you have one controlling narrative and little space for dissenting voices within a political conversation. 

Also, the role of surveillance and the way in which people are constantly being watched and judged. And the importance of disinformation and the manipulation of truth as a vehicle of those who want to seize power and hold power illegitimately. All of those things in different ways are very apparent in our 21st-century moment.

One of the things that makes 2024 different from 1984 is that we are being constantly surveilled, but outside of TikTok or mainland China, it’s principally not a state that is surveilling us so much as large private corporations. In that sense, we’re being watched, and this is the Orwell of the giant eye that you often see on posters or book covers or T-shirts. But we’re also living in an age where you do have a lack of space for dialogue and you do have one dominating, controlling voice for a lot of people. 

For some, like in Putin’s Russia or in Xi’s China, that’s through active state censorship. But for other people in the democratic West, it’s about the ways that people consume information and these information vacuums, where you can live in an ostensibly free society but never hear a genuine exchange of opinion and never hear dissenting voices. And Orwell was a real critic of that way of living. He believed in the importance of truth, but he also believed in the importance of a free dialogue and exchange of ideas.

One of Orwell’s enduring obsessions was the uses and abuses of language. This is why he was so sensitive to the role of euphemisms in our political language. What did he have to say about that?

As he sees it, the problem with euphemisms is that they elide truth, they paper over ugly realities. So, for example, when you talk about “illegal immigrants” as a catch-all phrase, that elides the actual lived experience of a lot of the people who risked their lives to cross the border and the ways in which many of them are victims, many of them are under threat, and gives this sense of menace to an entire group through this term that is meant to obscure as much as it categorizes or clarifies. 

So he’s very conscious of the power of language and the narrowing of acceptable political language. He knows that if you can’t talk about ideas, they lose their political power because they’re unable to be articulated. At the end of 1984 , Orwell had this amazing appendix which his early US editors wanted to cut and he insisted that the book couldn’t be published without it. It’s a short history of Newspeak, which is the language of IngSoc in 1984 . You can see how it works to reduce language and therefore reduce the acceptable range of political ideas that can be thought and articulated.

He’s always really clear about the ways that language can hide as much as it reveals, and I think one of the great strengths of his writing is the way that he insists on clarity in written and spoken English. He doesn’t like to use passive tense, he doesn’t use too many adjectives. It’s very clear, journalistic writing.

To that point about his clarity, this is part of what makes his shapeless legacy so mystifying. He wrote so clearly and so simply and yet he’s been so effortlessly appropriated by the left and the right. Why do you think he became such a two-dimensional caricature in that way?

I think, in some ways, that’s the risk of dying young, right? He’s born in 1903 and he died in 1950. He dies before the Cold War really heats up, though he might’ve been the first person to use the term “Cold War” in an essay called “You and the Atom Bomb,” which he wrote shortly before his death. But he passes away before a lot of the political changes that have defined the modern moment.

What do you think Orwell got most wrong? 

There are the things that he realized he got wrong before he passed away. One of those is this idea that, in order for Britain to win the war against Nazism, it would have to reform itself internally, and that doesn’t really happen. A Labor government is elected with a majority [for] the first time in 1945 and there are significant social changes that come along with that, but there is no real effective revolution and the war is won without that. And he recognized his own error, and I think some of his political pessimism in his later years is the result of the thwarting of that feeling of optimism that he had about the potential for social change in the early years of the war.

But I think more fundamentally, from our 21st-century perspective, it’s about what we were talking about earlier. He failed to appreciate the evolution of surveillance and state power. If you’re living in Russia or communist China right now, this is a very serious issue. But if you’re living in the West, your surveillance is not coming from the state for the most part; it’s coming from private corporations. And I think he just didn’t foresee the role that large corporations would play in controlling our access to information and controlling information about us in the 21st century. And I think that’s partly because he was a real technophobe and it comes through in a lot of his writing. He really sees technology as an enemy of culture and is someone who thinks that people should work the land and read books as opposed to playing with mechanical blocks.

I’ve never heard Orwell described as a “technophobe,” but that helps explain what I’ve always considered his biggest blind spot. Although he diagnosed the 20th century so well, he just didn’t anticipate the 21st century. If you’re looking for prophecy, a book like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is the one you want, not 1984 . Neil Postman sums this up better than anyone else in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death , and it’s worth reading the passage in full:

What George Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Aldous Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information, Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us, Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture, Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. 

If you’re comparing Huxley and Orwell, what stands out to me is Huxley’s idea that the pleasure principle actually can be something malign. That we could be stupefied into complacency and as a result we lose our will to revolt. Huxley has a much more sophisticated bread-and-circuses view of how people can be dominated and controlled. 

For Orwell, the ways in which people are dominated and controlled is not through pleasure but through pain. 1984 , in many ways, is a very graphic tale of someone’s torture and eventual breakdown. So there’s a brutal austerity to the violent mechanisms of control in Orwell. I think that’s partially a reflection of the poverty that he experienced as a social investigator, writing Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, and the poverty that he saw at the ends of empire. He thinks that control is not through pacifying people in such a way that they don’t have the will to revolt, but about violently repressing them in such a way that they don’t have the ability to revolt.

So maybe it’s true that complacency is more of a threat in the 21st century as rising standards of living take away people’s political edge. But there are still an awful lot of people being brutally and violently repressed into conformity in our age as well, so I guess there’s space for both dystopias in 2024.

What would you say is Orwell’s most relevant lesson for the 21st century?

I think the lesson that those of us in the West could do best to heed is this idea that people need to defend the right to say that two plus two equals four, but that doing this is a responsibility as much as it is a right. Being given the right to speak your truth is also an obligation to have a truth to speak. It’s not a right to say that two plus two equals five, it’s a right to articulate truth in the space of lies and disinformation and to speak out against lies and disinformation. And that was something that Orwell was committed to throughout his own career, in his journalistic writing and in his personal politics. If he does have a legacy for the 21st century, it’s this power of facing unpleasant facts and standing up for truth in a time of disinformation and doublethink. That is his most important legacy.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Pandora , or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

The post What George Orwell’s 1984 can teach us about 2024 appeared first on Vox .

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19 Facts About Tim Walz, Harris’s Pick for Vice President

Mr. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, worked as a high school social studies teacher and football coach, served in the Army National Guard and chooses Diet Mountain Dew over alcohol.

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By Simon J. Levien and Maggie Astor

• Published Aug. 6, 2024 Updated Aug. 9, 2024

Until recently, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was a virtual unknown outside of the Midwest, even among Democrats. But his stock rose fast in the days after President Biden withdrew from the race, clearing a path for Ms. Harris to replace him and pick Mr. Walz as her No. 2.

Here’s a closer look at the Democrats’ new choice for vice president.

1. He is a (very recent) social media darling . Mr. Walz has enjoyed a groundswell of support online from users commenting on his Midwestern “dad vibes” and appealing ordinariness.

2. He started the whole “weird” thing. It was Mr. Walz who labeled former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, “weird” on cable television just a couple of weeks ago. The description soon became a Democratic talking point.

3. He named a highway after Prince and signed the bill in purple ink. “I think we can lay to rest that this is the coolest bill signing we’ll ever do,” he said as he put his name on legislation declaring a stretch of Highway 5 the “Prince Rogers Nelson Memorial Highway” after the musician who had lived in Minnesota.

4. He reminds you of your high school history teacher for a reason. Mr. Walz taught high school social studies and geography — first in Alliance, Neb., and then in Mankato, Minn. — before entering politics.

5. He taught in China in 1989 and speaks some Mandarin. He went to China for a year after graduating from college and taught English there through a program affiliated with Harvard University.

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