The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. 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. 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. 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. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. 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. In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Orwell relates what he believes to be a close association between bad prose and oppressive ideology: Orwell encourages concreteness and clarity instead of vagueness, and individuality over political conformity. This unclear prose was a 'contagion' which had spread to those who did not intend to hide the truth, and it concealed a writer's thoughts from himself and others. Orwell believed that the language used was necessarily vague or meaningless because it was intended to hide the truth rather than express it.

The essay focused on political language, which, according to Orwell, 'is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind'. ' Politics and the English Language' (1946) is an essay by George Orwell that criticised the 'ugly and inaccurate' written English of his time and examined the connection between political orthodoxies and the debasement of language.

Essays by George Orwell