Home-made turn of speech
In George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” he identifies common tropes that writers use to dodge the hard work of prose construction. He builds out a “catalogue of swindles and perversions” including: dying metaphors, operators/false limbs, pretentious diction, meaningless words.
Growing up, my parents read the Valley News every day. My parents have very different styles of operation, ways of seeing/being in the world, and as a result very different ways of languaging the world they shared. My brother once referred to them as a mud wasp and a mayfly*. If both were trapped in a sealed bottle, one will go up and down the walls of their prison jar meticulously exploring every surface in search of escape, the other will bounce around randomly playing the jackpot. I think this is a fair description of my parents.
In elementary school we had a new vocabulary list every week. I would slyly ask my mom for a definition. Of course she knew full well what a scam I was committing and she volleyed with her own scam simply saying “I don’t know what that word means either dear, let me look it up. I’d like to know it, too.” I would feel the hot joy of efficiently getting my homework done and cleverly write down the definition she read from the Book. The irony of course, is that I am now very fond of looking up words even if I use them poetically more than precisely (my precise friend Leslie will gleefully share some of my doozies).
My father on the other hand would distort the sounds of words, acting like he didn’t know the correct pronunciation: Jal-o-pain-yo peppers or please pass the cat-soup. I was awful; I didn’t understand his play and I corrected him. When I was in high school I saw my father get angry with an article in the Valley News. ‘Why can’t they just use simple language?’ And I said ‘just look the word up - it might be a neat one!’. He responded gruffly ‘I don’t have time to look it up’. I’m not sure I had learned my mom’s generosity yet to kindly offer to look it up for him. But the point is, being a youth is NOT being a hard-working adult and I had No Idea how insensitive I or the article writer were. After all, a paper is intended to provide fast communication to the most people about meaningful events and ideas. I would say, my father was unconsciously aware then of where it might lead: the information schism in the U.S. today.
While Orwell argues language can be an ‘instrument which we shape for our own purpose’. He posits the issue at hand is instead: “The whole tendency of modern prose is (to move) away from concreteness.” For example:
option a: Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry
option b: There was a rectification of frontiers
He argues that the phrasing in option b ‘anesthetizes a portion of one’s brain’. This is political speech that reduces consciousness and is favorable to political conformity. It is speech that is the defense of the of the indefensible.
He provides some writing advice: Let the meaning choose the word.
When you think of a concrete object you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, 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.
To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.
I would also argue: Let context choose the magnitude of reporting or listening or reading or watching (born from a conversation with my friend Maggie).
option a: On June 15, 2023, “Greece boat disaster: Capsized boat had 100 children in hold, BBC told”
option b: On June 19, 2023, “Deep-sea craft carrying 5 people to Titanic wreckage reported missing, search underway”
I don’t know about you, but without even trying to pay attention, I heard far more about the deep-sea craft than the capsized boat of immigrants. Our sense of scale/scope/perspective/proportion are way off. Based on only the deaths below, what are the struggles that are driving this risk? What are the lives like on the other side of this risk. This is not recreational exploration. This is crisis.
Orwell wrote this essay in 1946.
Now we have google dictionaries, an infinite supply of possible ‘truths’ crawling and morphing through the internet, and maybe even Bot-staff-writers working for free at select papers! Here are some of his 1946 samples of human ‘ready-made’ phrasings in lieu of simply saying “I think”:
In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that…
A consideration which we should do well to bear in mind…
A conclusion to which all of us would readily assent…
But just as everyone is thinking about whether or not ChatGPT is going to solve every current problem or initiate every future problem, I would argue our current economic system is already a robot of dead language suffering from Orwell’s critique. When folks invoke ‘economic reasoning’ as to why it’s not possible to address climate change, they are deferring to the abstractions-abstraction! That is ‘throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in.” It is the defense of the indefensible.
Look at Darwin’s use of “I think”. It is a brilliant beginning to Any Sentence or drawing or diagraming or ???. Let’s willfully shape our language for our purpose.
Tree of Life: the first-known sketch by Charles Darwin of an evolutionary tree describing the relationships among groups of organisms
*according to wiki: The English poet George Crabbe compared the brief life of a daily newspaper with that of a mayfly in the satirical poem "The Newspaper" (1785), both being known as "ephemera".
