Politics and the English Language

Question 9: How would you describe the tone of Orwell's essay? Can you sum it up in one word, or does the essay range from one tone to another? Cite specific passages to support your response.


The primary tone of Orwell's essay is serious, although his examples tend to be entertaining. More than anything, I see it as a warning to people of the time that language can be misused and misunderstood. He centers on political writing because, at the time, this is what concerned people. His point was that if people don't pay attention to the misuse of language, they might agree to things or believe things that aren't right. Like when he talks about politicians, and the people who write their speeches, he says that they repeat the same phrases to try to convince people of things, but they lose their meaning.

"When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases--bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained 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." It's like people going through the motions to get the people to believe what politicians want them to believe.

If they use euphemisms, or simple pleasant words and phrases in place of unpleasant words, it's kind of the same thing. If we're not careful as readers and listeners of these words, we won't pay close enough attention to what is really being said. He talks about defending political actions by describing them in pleasant euphemisms so people will more easily accept them. "Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants drive out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification." It's easier to get people to accept the government doing this to poor people in a village if it is called pacification.

Orwell is right. We need to seriously pay attention to language, especially the language of people who are in the government. If we don't, they can just keep using "pleasant" words and phrases to describe their otherwise bad actions and we will just accept it.