Why I still like Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” essay (even though he gets some of the linguistics wrong)

Brett Reynolds writes:

I liked the two-column move in your Orwell post. It seems genuinely useful. I wondered, though, about the choice of Orwell as patron saint for the argument. The central point in your post seems stronger than Orwell’s essay itself, which bundles a real concern about euphemism and overclaiming with a lot of shaky style doctrine about passives, short words, cliché, and so on. My sense is that your argument works best as a claim about aligning evidence and rhetoric, not as an Orwellian one.

Reynolds also links to this article by Geoffrey Pullum, “Fear and loathing of the English passive.”

Here’s my response:

Orwell was just one guy. I’d say he was one of the great writers of the century, with two memorable novels (Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four), two important political books (The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia), and a range of unforgettable literary and political essays. All these remain readable and relevant today. He’s not a perfect writer, but nobody is. William Faulkner’s great; he also wrote some gobbledygook. Not all of Fitzgerald’s paragraphs were gold; Hemingway had his share of duds, etc. The characters in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are not fully-realized characters—Orwell was no Edith Wharton—but characters aren’t not the only point of a novel. There are many ways to make a contribution. Ozzie Smith wasn’t much of a slugger but he still belongs in the Hall.

Orwell’s famous (and, I would say, wonderful) essay, Politics and the English Language . . . it’s just something he wrote. It’s not perfect. It’s more polished than a blog post, but there’s nothing thorough about it, and I can well believe that he got a lot of the linguistics wrong. Orwell was giving his impressions based on his experience as a writer.

Maybe the relevant question is, What should Orwell’s essay be compared to? Or, What’s the audience?

Compared to standard writing advice (the “five-paragraph essay” and all the rest), Politics and the English Language is fresh and liberating, both in its exhortations to write directly and clearly and in its connection of writing to politics, conveying the sense that writing can be a deeply moral activity.

And the connection between writing and politics is subtle. Orwell was writing at a time when there was a lot of pressure for people to write lies or to write in obfuscating ways in order to serve some political agenda. Orwell’s way of connecting writing to politics was different and more subtle than that.

I think these messages remain important today, both in political and in scientific writing, as discussed in my earlier post. So I value Orwell, even if he gave some specific advice that made no sense and didn’t understand about the passive voice and just overall had naive views about linguistics.

Maybe a good analogy is: George Orwell is to linguistics as Nate Silver is to statistics. Orwell had a deep understanding backed up by years of practice, and was able to communicate this understanding to millions of people. Go granular on Orwell and you’ll see lots of mistakes and lots of overconfidence on his part, as well as a dismissal of or annoyance with experts, but still a net positive and with important insights that experts can value as well. Similarly with Nate Silver, who’s done excellent statistical work in both politics and sports, and, yes, sometimes he gets things wrong and isn’t interested in learning from his mistakes, and that annoys me, and sometimes his thoughts on political science are not fully thought through—but he offers a unique perspective and his writings are valuable, not just for outsiders but for experts as well.