"Politics and the English Language"

On the necessity of thought in composing political speech, George Orwell said:

"You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They 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 connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear."

Michael Leddy correctly draws the parallels between the above and everything ever said by Sarah Palin.

Personally, I have certain 'pet phrases' that make their way into my writing, but as more of a conscious, linguistic game with myself. I can, however, easily see Orwell's point about
"ready-made phrases...construct[ing] your sentences for you--even think[ing] your thoughts for you, to a certain extent" occasionally made manifest in my mind. It can sometimes be startling the limited extent to which one has control over their own thoughts. This was a point brought home to me during meditation, as I initially, and counter-productively, struggled to quiet the voices in my head; words and phrases simply swirled within my consciousness with little input from my conscious mind.

Looking to Orwell's essay itself, I particularly enjoyed this:

"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."

-Take for example, George Bush's much used refrain: “That is why, for the security of America and the peace of the world, we are spreading the hope of freedom.”

And this:

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense 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. Defenseless 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...Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."

-The language of the "War on Terror" springs immediately to mind: 'enhanced interrogation techniques' anybody?

It really is true, especially in the world of politics, that "The more things change, the more they stay the same" or, as The Who put it, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."