« Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen | Main | Local News »
April 11, 2005
Orwell and Racism in Word Choice
One of the commentors on a recent post wrote the following in connection with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language":
I find it hard to take seriously a writer who prefers Anglo-Saxon words to those of Latin or Greek origin, a full 2000 years after the Roman occupation of Britain. Nothing Orwell says makes me believe this is anything but plain, old-fashioned racism.
Is Orwell's position on avoiding expressions with foreign origins racist?
Maybe. I like to think that Orwell would have wanted us to be on the look out for racism in his work, and to highlight it when we see it. (And I would want people to do that with mine - unpleasant though the accusations and realisation would undoubtedly be.) Here is what Orwell says about Greek and Latin words, so that you can judge for yourself:
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate , are used to dress up a simple statement and give an aire of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion . Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien r&eacutgime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung , are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g. , and etc. , there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous , and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard , etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
And then later, in his summary, one of his six recommendations is:
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Though, of course, this is then tempered by recommendation 6 which reads:
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
I want to suggest that we should count this as a form of racism if the ground for using an English word in place of a foreign word is merely that it is English in origin and the other is foreign in origin (henceforth I will just say foreign and English words.) Of course it might be tempting to point out that Orwell's grounds for rejecting foreign words is that they are pretentious, not merely that they are foreign. But "pretentious" is a normative expression, and if the sole reason they are felt to be pretentious is that they are foreign, then this is merely an evasion. The crucial question will be whether there is any other reason not to use them, or any other reason for calling them pretentious.
One reason suggests itself: they are, for the expected audience , harder to understand. Many writers have an obligation to write in such a way that they can be understood. Most serious non-fiction writers have an obligation to write in such a way that it is hard for them to be misunderstood. So perhaps we should avoid foreign words - not because they are foreign - but because we care about communicating something to our audience, and foreign words will make it harder to do that.
But this defence of Orwell runs into trouble when we look at Orwell's list of foreign words: phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate; cul de sac, ancien r&eacutgime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung; expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous. While we might make a case that someone who used "mutatis mutandis" - in the context of, say, a letter to the local paper - was being inconsiderate of his audience, I don't think we can claim that "element", "individual" or "basic" are hard for English speakers to understand. So that reason isn't good enough.
One trick of Orwell's that I think is very effective in convincing the reader that Orwell is on to something here, is his translation of a verse from the bible into what he calls "modern English." Here is the original:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here is the translation:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
First passage - kind of beautiful. Second passage - not. Is the second passage harder to understand? Well, the first is both poetic and archaic. "Happeneth"? "neither yet bread to the wise"? It requires a little interpretation. What it does have over the second is vivid imagery - it uses specific examples where the second passage is more general - and the first passage has a greater proportion of monosyllabic words.
Is generality and abstractness responsible for unclarity? Not on its own. The languages of mathematics and logic deal with unusually abstract and general issues and yet they are also unusually precise.
Is there any reason to link polysyllabic words with lack of clarity? At first blush this might seem ridiculous. Some languages - such as Latin and German - are much more apt to stick words and bits of words together than English is. (Patently I could do with some help from a friendly linguist here.) Does (or did) this tendency make sentences written in them less clear to their native speakers? That seems very unlikely. So it seems silly to favour mono- over polysyllabic words in general.
But could it be that when polysyllabic words are imported into English they encourage unclarity? Perhaps some of the information available - just by looking at the word - to someone who understands Latin affixes and morphology may not be available to someone who does not. But in many cases the original meaning of the word is now irrelevant to the meaning of the word in English anyway. Exciting new discoveries about what the Greeks really meant by "idea" should not change our views on the meaning of the English word "idea". And none of this threatens the fact that that "individual", "element" and "exploit" are all perfectly well understood by most native English speakers.
I see no good, non-xenaphobic justification of the claim that we should avoid foreign expressions in "Politics and the English Language". So why does Orwell say that we should not use them? Perhaps part of the explanation is some British jingoism, combined with a romantic attachment to the past of the kind that Orwell himself criticises in his own anti-racist essay "Notes on Nationalism". This is a kind of racism. But if that is part of the explanation, I suspect a full explanation would include i) Orwell's antipathy towards to British middle classes and the way they use language and iii) some careless over-generalisation from poor uses of foreign expressions.
I suppose this only goes to show that you can write essays against xenophobia, run off to Spain fight for POUM (the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) in the civil war, and point out that the pigs can get away with saying things like "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", and still fuck up it all up - in print, no less - yourself.
I think there's probably a lot more to be said here, so I might write up this up in more detail later on. Comments are very welcome on this one (and if you sign into Typepad, you can comment without waiting for the comment to be approved.)
Posted by logican at April 11, 2005 02:30 PM
Trackback Pings
The trackback address for this entry is:
http://www.logicandlanguage.net/trakbak.cgi/36
Comments
Gillian --
Nice to see you take my post and explore the idea further.
I disagree completely with him about the impacts of these words. The translated Bible passage he presents is not as poetic as the original, I grant, but it *is* meaningful, and it is not ugly or unpleasant. It would fit very well into a government document or a management consultancy report (both of which I've written my share) -- ie, documents intended to convey very precise yet also highly-qualified meanings, in an unemotional and neutral tone.
One can of course question whether such documents should be neutral and unemotional, but given that they are intended to be so, then the use of words with finely-calibrated meanings is exactly appropriate. That these words are mostly foreign says something about the roots of our contemporary culture, and how little this culture depends on whatever culture the Anglo-Saxons had.
The problem is that Anglo-Saxon had no word for disintermediation, or antidisestablishmentarianism, or even socialism, for that matter, which is why we need to use the foreign words. I can't help thinking Orwell's real agenda here is political, not linguistic -- to take us all back to some pre-Roman rural utopia, like the ascetic, solitary (and ultimately fatal) life he himself lived. To anyone who has seen subsistence life upclose, this is not a pleasant prospect.
In summary, Orwell has not convinced me to avoid words of foreign origin, or even to consider whether the words I use are foreign or not. After reading your comments, I still think he exhibits here nasty "Little England" attitudes and perhaps intentions.
Posted by: Peter McBurney at April 12, 2005 07:39 AM
A historical note (I'm relying on 'The English Language' by Charles Barber, Cambridge University Press: 2000):
Regarding Peter's '2000 years' and 'Pre-Roman': the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain was *after* the Roman occupation. 'There is some archaeological evidence that Saxons settled in East Anglia and the Vale of York while Britain was still a Roman province, but the main settlements were made after the Roman legions had withdrawn from Britain in AD 410' [p. 100]. Old English had very little Latin or Greek vocabulary.
After the Norman invasion, French became the language of the upper classes, while the majority ('lowe men') kept to English [pp135-6]. When English regained dominance in the 13th-14th centuries, a lot of French words were appropriated into it. 'When bilingual speakers were changing over to English for such purposes as government and literature, they felt the need for the specialized terms that they were accustomed to in those fields, and brought them over from French' [p.146].
This is the first major importation of Latinate words. I think the fact that they were introduced through the upper classes may be relevant to the question why they are felt to be pretentious. One more quote from Barber:
'There are other indications of the aristocratic stamp of medieval French loan-words. Things connected with ordinary people tend to retain their English names, whereas upper-class objects often have French names. Thus we have English 'home' and 'house' but French 'manor' and 'palace'; English 'child', 'daughter', and 'son', but French 'heir' and 'nurse'; English 'maid', 'man', and 'woman', but French 'butler' and 'servant'; English 'calf', 'ox', 'sheep', and 'swine', but French 'veal', 'beef', 'mutton', and 'pork'. In Modern English we often have French and Germanic words surviving side-by-side with similar meanings; in such cases the Germanic word tends to be more popular, and perhaps more emotionally charged, while the French word is often more formal, refined, or official. Thus we have such pairs as 'doom' and 'judgement', 'folk' and 'nation', 'hearty' and 'cordial', 'holy man' and 'saint', 'stench' and 'odour'.
Then, of course, there was a huge wave of linguistic borrowing in the Renaissance. I suspect most of Orwell's examples derive from this period. The OED's earliest example of 'phenomenon' dates from 1576; its earliest example of 'individual' as a noun is from 1605 (there's an instance of it as an adjective meaning 'indivisible', in a theological context, from c1425).
I'd like to try answering your philosophical arguments later, but I thought this information might be useful to have in the background.
One more thing for now: please note that Orwell writes:
'Nor does it [the defense of the English language] even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.'
Posted by: Jacob at April 14, 2005 12:40 PM
Interesting, Jacob. Thanks for the correction on settlement dates.
Regarding your quotation:
English 'calf', 'ox', 'sheep', and 'swine', but French 'veal', 'beef', 'mutton', and 'pork'.
I knew this example, but what is interesting here is that the French words all refer to the cooked animal, while the Anglo-Saxon words
refer to the live animal. The meanings are thus quite distinct, which is perhaps why both sets of words have survived. I doubt there is a class difference here (unless the pre-Norman English did not cook their food?).
Something I have long thought interesting is this: The Normans who invaded England in 1066 were French speakers, yet ethnic norwegians (vikings). Why did they adopt French language and culture when they invaded Normandy, yet retain these when they invaded England?
Posted by: Peter McBurney at April 14, 2005 03:06 PM
So I'd like to try sketching a justification for what Orwell says about foreign words and words from Latin. I think he would (rightly) assent to claims along the following lines:
(1) Often, in order to appreciate the moral import of an action or a state of affairs, one needs to imagine it clearly.
(2) Different sentences can very differently help or hinder the clear imagination of what they describe, even if their truth conditions in their contexts are not very different.
Call writing 'clear' if it helps a reader clearly imagine what it describes. (This is a special usage.) Then I think we can argue from (1) and (2) to the conclusion that clear writing is often needed in order for people to appreciate the moral import of actions and states of affairs. Orwell argues that political writing should be clear (in my technical sense), diagnoses some sources of unclarity, and makes some recommendations.
So now, has he got any good reasons to think that the use of Latin and foreign words tends to make political writing unclear? Well, there's no good argument that we should ALWAYS avoid them, but I think they are often used to make writing less clear. That's because their use is sometimes vague and pretentious.
VAGUE: suppose the writer has a choice betwen the phrases 'kill people', 'eliminate individuals', and 'eliminate elements'. Context may fix that the domain of individuals or elements is restricted to the set of people, and that the domain of eliminations is restricted to the set of killings. If so, the writer's sentence will have the same truth conditions no matter what. But the first phrase calls up a clearer image, at least for me.
'Element' and 'individual' aren't vague in the philosopher's technical sense, but their extensions are way the hell wider than needed. So it's fair to call their use here vague.
PRETENTIOUS: many Latin and foreign words have a high register. This is a non-normative claim (I think), which we could test against English-speakers' intuitions; I think people have pretty clear intuitions, and are in general agreement, about the tone of different expressions. An expression is pretentious if its tone is inappropriately elevated for what it's being used to say. That's the normative part.
I suggest that pretentious expression interferes with a reader's having a fitting emotional response to what is described, and thereby interferes with her appreciating its moral import. At least if the reader herself doesn't view the expression as pretentious, she will tend to regard what is described as something more dignified than it is.
All this would need a lot of expansion and defense, but I think it's a promising line to take, and that it suggests answers to most of Gill's worries. What importantly remains to be argued is that Latin and foreign words have any greater tendency to be used vaguely and pretentiously than Anglo-Saxon words. I expect Peter will deny this. I'm curious what y'all think of the rest of the argument.
Posted by: Jacob at April 16, 2005 05:36 PM
Sorry, but this essay doesn't "fuck it all up," for Orwell, regardless of your interpertation. This post due to the nature of his past and that of the essay. This is not to say that an essay couldn't fuck it all up for someone, just that this particular one doesn't for Orwell.
Posted by: Insurrezzion at September 19, 2006 07:21 AM