George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 17 March 1944 With no power to put
my decrees into operation, but with as much authority as most of the exile
governments now sheltering in various parts of the world, I pronounce sentence
of death on the following words and expressions:
Achilles heel, jackboot, hydra-headed, ride roughshod over,
stab in the back, petty-bourgeois, stinking corpse, liquidate, iron heel, blood-stained
oppressor, cynical betrayal, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, jackal, hyena, blood-bath.
No doubt this list will have to be added to from time to time,
but it will do to go on with. It contains a fair selection of the dead metaphors and
ill-translated foreign phrases which have been current in Marxist literature for years past.
There are, of course, many other perversions of the English language besides this one.
There is official English, or Stripetrouser, the language of White Papers, Parliamentary
debates (in their more decorous moments) and B.B.C. news bulletins. There are the
scientists and the economists, with their instinctive preference for words like
contraindicate and deregionalization. There is American slang,
which for all its attractiveness probably tends to impoverish the language in the long
run. And there is the general slovenliness of modern English speech with its decadent
vowel sounds (throughout the London area you have to use sign language to distinguish
between threepence and three-halfpence) and its tendency to make
verbs and nouns interchangeable. But here I am concerned only with one kind of bad
English, Marxist English, or Pamphletese, which can be studied in the Daily Worker,
the Labour Monthly, Plebs, the New Leader, and similar papers.
Many of the expressions used in political literature are simply
euphemisms or rhetorical tricks. Liquidate for instance (or
eliminate) is a polite word for to kill, while realism
normally means dishonesty. But Marxist phraseology is peculiar in that it
consists largely of translations. Its characteristic vocabulary comes ultimately from
German or Russian phrases which have been adopted in one country after another with no
attempt to find suitable equivalents. Here, for instance, is a piece of Marxist writing
it happens to be an address delivered to the Allied armies by the citizens of
Pantelleria. The citizens of Pantelleria
pay grateful homage to the Anglo-American forces for the promptness with
which they have liberated them from the evil yoke of a megalomaniac and satanic régime
which, not content with having sucked like a monstrous octopus the best energies of true
Italians for twenty years, is now reducing Italy to a mass of ruins and misery for one
motive only the insane personal profit of its chiefs, who, under an ill-concealed
mask of hollow, so-called patriotism, hide the basest passions, and, plotting together
with the German pirates, hatch the lowest egoism and blackest treatment while all the
time, with revolting cynicism, they tread on the blood of thousands of Italians.
This filthy stew of words is presumably a translation from the Italian,
but the point is that one would not recognize it as such. It might be a translation from
any other European language, or it might come straight out of the Daily Worker, so
truly international is this style of writing. Its characteristic is the endless use of
ready-made metaphors. In the same spirit, when Italian submarines were sinking the ships
that took arms to Republican Spain, the Daily Worker urged the British Admiralty to
sweep the mad dogs from the seas. Clearly, people capable of using such
phrases have ceased to remember that words have meanings.
A Russian friend tells me that the Russian language is richer
than English in terms of abuse, so that Russian invective cannot always be accurately
translated. Thus when Molotov
referred to the Germans as cannibals, he was perhaps using some word which
sounded natural in Russian, but to which cannibal was only a rough
approximation. But our local Communists
have taken over, from the defunct Inprecor and similar sources, a whole series of
these crudely translated phrases, and from force of habit have come to think of them as
actual English expressions. The Communist vocabulary of abuse (applied to Fascists or Socialists according to the
line of the moment) includes such terms as hyena, corpse, lackey, pirate,
hangman, bloodsucker, mad dog, criminal, assassin. Whether at first, second or third hand,
these are all translations, and by no means the kind of word that an English person
naturally uses to express disapproval. The language of this kind is used with an
astonishing indifference as to its meaning. Ask a journalist what a jackboot is, and you
will find that he does not know. Yet he goes on talking about jackboots. Or what is meant
by to ride roughshod? Very few people know that either. For that matter, in my
experience, very few Socialists know the meaning of the word proletariat.
You can see a good example of Marxist language at its worst in
the words lackey and flunkey. Pre-revolutionary Russia was still a
feudal country in which hordes of idle men-servants were part of the social set-up; in
that context lackey, as a word of abuse, had a meaning. In England, the social
landscape is quite different. Except at public functions, the last time I saw a footman in
livery was in 1921. And, in fact, in ordinary speech, the word flunkey has
been obsolete since the nineties, and the word lackey for about a century. Yet
they and other equally inappropriate words are dug up for pamphleteering purposes. The
result is a style of writing that bears the same relation to writing real English as doing
a jigsaw puzzle bears to painting a picture. It is just a question of fitting together a
number of ready-made pieces. Just talk about hydra-headed jack-boots riding roughshod over
blood-stained hyenas, and you are all right. For confirmation of which, see almost any
pamphlet issued by the Communist Party or by any other political party, for that
matter. |