In our ever changing world, where gender is trully becoming androgynous. Women are becoming equal and the gender confused are becoming accepted. It would seem that the long stuggle for women's right is archaic as the notion that the earth is flat. Students in my class, even girls, scoff at feminist material and cannot conceive of a time when women had to fight for the opportunity to be treated with common dignity. And yes, to be politically correct, there are pletny of other minorities that I am ignoring here (gays, lesbians, transgendered, all races, all handicapped, everyone is a minority now, I KNOW!). Anyway, back to my point which is women are not equal, it's an illusion. We make 70 cents to a man's $1.00. What? Equal? No, ma'am. But all in all, things are better. I can vote, and I do every chance that I get because all the Womyn generation that taught me feminism demanded that women must vote to be heard--women fought hard so that we could have the right to vote. So, every chance I get, whether I think it counts or not, I vote. I vote for the women that were not allowed to and the women that are still not allowed to all over the world. I vote for the Gilman's that were locked in their rooms and told to rest.
So, my actual point to all this rambling about feminism is that I have stumbled into one of the last frontiers of male domination----Video Games. Girls, they have taken over. First of all, I have always been considered a tomboy--such a wonderful term. Meaning I didn't want to play with dolls and be trained to be someone's wife. Instead I played war in the "jungle" and ran around with the boys in town. I also played Risk and Battleship. So, yes I was different. The boys excepted me as "one of the guys" and the girls thought I was a weirdo most of the time.
Getting off track again! I've recently become very obssessed with a PS2 game called Dragon Quest VIII. Until this game, I haven't really played video games since I was a younger. I began playing Atari on the black and white TV of my older brother's. Then, later the original Nintendo. Conquering the first SuperMario world, flying a plane in Top Gun, and mostly loving the hell out of Zelda. Then later a Gameboy--ignoring the outside world for months tackling Tetris and SuperMarioLand. But then like Christopher Robin, I grew up and left my childish things behind. Video games were my Pooh.
To my disbelief, video games grew up right along with me! Sure, I watched boys in college stay up all night drinking and playing video games, then not making it to class. Instead, we drank coffee, wrote poetry and discussed the Beats and listened to someone play a lone guitar while we drank coffee and smoked. We didn't give a second thought to video games. We had books and all these thoughts that we spouted with enthusiasm and everything was more important than it had ever been. But we forgot about the video games. We never discussed them or played them. We rolled our eyes at the boys and their video games.
We were so wrong. Although not the intellectual stimulous as Woolf or Wollstencraft, video games have redeaming qualities that I never really knew about. Boys don't invite us in to this video game world. They don't convince us to play video games. But I have discovered that video games rule! They are just as fun as when I was a kid because they are amazingly advanced and powerfully creative. But....
What the hell is the deal with the women in these games???? Yes, I came from SuperMario where the hero (male) has to save the princess. How condescending! Now the games have advanced but the neanderthal bullshit hasn't! Let me give you a run down of the women in Dragon Quest VIII... Jessica. One of the four in the hero's party. Of course, the only woman. Her defenses suck, her attack is weak and she is to up her armour you have to dress her like a hooker!!! She even has a bunny suit outfit with fishnets and all! And she is the only character whose clothes "change" with the scenes when you acquire a new outfit/armour/weapon. Only the woman with her boobs flying out of her shirt and hips...well, you get the picture. Also, under her magical quality category it is called Sex Appeal. Whereas the men are Charisma and Humanity. So, her entire worth is her sex appeal. She is only in the game so guys playing have some chippee to look at. She is not valued in any other way. Then Red... How nice, she doesn't even get a name! She is named after the color of clothes she is wearing. She is dressed very scantily and is of questionable morals. She is a thief and a bitch. She lives alone with of course a guard protecting her. Then there is the dead Queen of some land I forget the name--Arcania?. She is your typical I will do anything to make my man the King happy--giggling, obviously younger than him and obviously wasting her goals on making him happy. So much so, that he is devastated and in mourning until we come and make him stop whining. She was devoted to him--what about her and her life? It was only the king's! Then of course there are the women we meet in bars which are trully...bar wenches...
So, I get heated about this and tell my boyfriend about it, since this new video game obsession is all his fault. He is very supportive of the habit, since he will be able to play anytime he wants without me complaining. In response, he said that of course the games have women that are hot--mostly only guys play video games. If you want to play games you'll have to get used to it.
I'm sick of getting used to it!
I want the video game companies to make a game that is not only woman friendly, but also is just as quality as the male geared games. And I want a hand in it. I want a strong woman video game and I want to help write it!
On 60 minutes tonight, there was a report that 8.8 billion dollars has been misplaced. The money was budgeted to rebuild Iraq. Meaning the money was intended for contractors. Guess who has his hand in the cookie jar again? Meanwhile, our Congressional leaders are doing nothing to investigate losing 8.8 billion dollars! Nothing! Do you think any of us average citizens could get away with misplacing our tax money? This is outrageous. The empire is crumbling before us...
This is a response to another blog. I'm not sure if it went through, so here are my thoughts on why creationism is a waste of time to prove...
It has been a long road that I have been walking down to find some peace in my soul with spirituality. ... Religious stories of any kind are just that "stories". People rely too much on taking the Bible and other religous texts as factual. Though some information in it can be proven as fact, the book itself is a story. Much the same as any author writes stories. Well, a collection of stories. A Norton's anthology if you will! It was compliled by religious leaders of the time and many religious texts and stories were thrown aside. Banned from the canon. We only have a glimpse into the religious texts that made up Christianity because the "leaders" of the time were also the ruling, wealthy males of the time. Vast amounts of religious information was censored and cleansed before reaching "The Bible". It cannot be trusted even for what it is! ... All cultures have creation stories that cannot be proven scientifically. Why is there such a controversy about whether this story is true? It is absurd to think that you could prove the existence of events in a story. Does anyone try to prove the existence of Oz or Munchinland?
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad — I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:
1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.
Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia)
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)
4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.
DYING METAPHORS. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.
OPERATORS OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.
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 air 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 colour, 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 regime, 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(1). 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.
MEANINGLESS WORDS.In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning(2). Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
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 it is in modern English:
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.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance&rsquo that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip — alien for akin — making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another — but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a &lsquoarty line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. 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: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. 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 the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. 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. 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. 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. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: ‘[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence(3), to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it 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 around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.
Political correctness is a right wing attempt to confuse the public with feined sensitivity. Making a list of acceptable terms and throwing away your membership card in the KKK does not change the actions of these people. They are still working towards only their own selfish needs. How much money can one group have? We live in a terrifying world that values money over human life. It makes me sick. It should make us all sick. It should make us demand change. But we don't even know how to talk about it anymore.
Political correctness is the ultimate tool for conformity. When there is conformity, people stop thinking. When you are given a list of socially acceptable words, you no longer have to think about what to say. Most importantly, you no longer have to think.
Political correctness seemed like a good idea. Choose words that the majority agree upon and only use those words. These words appeared to clear up any offensive language. Use only the "correct" terminolgy or you were ostracized in polite conversation. The shock of hearing a word like nigger or wetback or faget was turned up a notch, rightly so. If anything good came out of this tangled mess of words it was the awareness of our language. An awareness that caused us to really hear what we were saying. But it ended there. We changed the way we spoke and then decided that we no longer had to think about it. We no longer had to think about how we would put words together.
Orwell tells us that when our language begins to decline, so does our civiliazation. Language is a measure of the society. As our language weakens and breaks down, so will our society. Our own president has the vocabulary of an eighth grader! Most sports figures and actors have a hard time forming a thought in front of a reporter. These are our role models, no wonder our children can no longer think. Most of my college freshman do not even know the word rhetoric when they walk into my class. They have very limited vocabulary and most have never read a novel all the way through. This is digraceful. I am ashamed of America. What is going on? Our sites are no longer set on education. Thus, the begin of the decline of America, begins with the decline of language then education, then society.
If we do not change the way we speak = think, then we will not survive. We forget that being a powerful nation does not guarantee we will continue as a successful nation. Even Rome fell.
The education system is falling apart. Our children are overwhelmed by violence. They have already seen too much. Schools are no longer teaching.
My sentiments are that we have already lost this generation. Why don't we just give up? They are all disrespectful little brats that have no decency. They don't respect there elders. Hell, they don't even have any respect for themselves. No one bothered to teach them that. Television did a bad job raising this generation. So, let's just stop it now. Start over. Clean slate. We're already on our way to ridding ourselves of the older portion of the TV generation. Right? We did find them a war after all. They have something to do and hopefully we will reduce our numbers in population.
The ungrateful brats wanted to go to college? What a laugh. Sure, college we'll let you go. But not for free. There were the few that thought it over and decided student loans were not the answer. The military. That's it. The military is the answer to everything. Hell, by then no one even remembered Veitnam. There was one paragraph in my high school American History class. One paragraph 20 years later. One paragraph. My teacher had only to say that it wasn't considered a WAR. We never declared war. He was a smart man. He taught me so much about history. He made me president of the history club. He taught us about the realities of the civil war and the devastation of WWII. He lived through the Vietnam war. He saw his friends leave and never come back. He saw a nation pull apart at the very seems that held it together. Democracy was never the same; america was never the same. He said nothing; it wasn't a war. It wasn't discussed; it was too painful. WHY DIDN'T HE TELL US?
WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL US? WHERE WERE YOU? OUR MOTHERS AND FATHERS PASSING ON CIVLIZATION, WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL US? WHY? MY TEARS ARE HOT WITH ANGER AND FRUSTRATION THAT COME FROM YOU! WHY DID YOU SELL US TO THE CORPORATIONS? WHY DID YOU LIE? WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL US IT WOULD HURT? YOU KISSED BOOBOOS AND MENDED OUCHIES, BUT YOU NEVER TOLD US THAT WAR WOULD HURT? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? TURN OFF THE TV AND TELL ME THAT WAR HURTS! TELL ME THAT NO ONE GETS OUR ALIVE! NO ONE IS THE SAME! TELL ME THAT THERE IS NOTHING POETIC ABOUT DYING FOR MONEY! WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME????
No one told us anything. We learned quietly, stupidly. I say we skip the formalities. The hell with the next generation--even more spoiled than us. They will never get it either. I don't want to tell them and maybe my friends won't come back in body bags if we send our children.
I propose that we just eliminate the wasted years of high school--even junior high, 6th grade education is just fine. The dumber the better here in the ole US of A! So, upon the event of their 13th birthday, we send them off. They are growing and failry sturdy at that age. They have been in the education system long enough not to question anything. To follow orders without thinking or analyzing. So, let's just send them to war.
Don't worry feminists...it is your time to shine. Girls, along with boys will get to experience the glory of war. They will be up on the front lines battling for our rights, our freedom. Protecting what is ours!
Hell, with the National Guard generation and the upcoming unnamed generation, we might as well start a new war. Let's pick a fight. Who's been bullying us? What can we get from them? Canada has nice ice skates. Kid like to ice skate. What do you say? Oh, or what about Australia, they have so much untapped land to mess with. Sound like fun, kids?
We talk about... We see it everyday; everywhere... We protest it. We argue. We fight against the violence--peacefully. We demand change. We urge others. Violence in the Media. Violence on television. Violence in our cartoons. Violence in our schools. Violence in our politics. Violence in WAR. Violence in our backyards. Violence at home. At home...
But what the hell does it all mean? What is violence? The word itself has become empty. People aren't even fazed by the term anymore. You told us so Orwell; you told us it would happen, but we didn't listen.
We condition our children by allowing them to become bullies. Allowing them to find power in the physical. To accept they are either bullies or bullied. "Stand up for yourself!" The American way. We no longer accept alternative strategies. When logic and common sense can no longer be found on the playground, we are in big trouble.
We program our children. They no longer understand how to channel anger; they find guns, real or pretend and act out accordingly. A fast solution in our drive-through society. They can no longer think about their actions; only react. Reactions.
We have an entire generation of children that have experienced metal detectors mixed with homeroom. We have taken away the yard darts of my own generation and handed these poor confused children guns and knives. They can no longer decifer the difference between real and play.
But can we...the adults? Has our entire society been handled with kid gloves? The kid gloves of the future are lined with bullies and power. Desensitizing mixed with censorship rather than teaching our children morals! With egg on our faces and blood on our hands how will we explain to a generation we were ignorant?! where will we find the words?
Children may only be able to react, but one day they will reflect. And then what? We tell them that is life. That is the way things are. Accept what you have done and move on...Maybe Hallmark has a new found cliche' to throw in here. A guide to teaching your children about moving on after violence; after your elders, the ones that shaped you, failed you; lied. That is the way things are kids.
But that isn't good enough. We aren't good enough. We are letting our children down. By condoning any violence. By allowing a violent war to continue that emphasizes money and power over morality and common sense, we are telling our children that bullies win. America the Bullies.
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that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
arty line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. 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: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.
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