New Words, George Orwell
At present the formation of new words is a slow process (I have read somewhere that English gains about six and losses about four words a year) and no new words are deliberately coined except as names for material objects. Abstract words are never coined at all, though old words (e. g. ‘condition’. ‘reflex’, etc.) are sometimes twisted into new meanings for scientific purposes. What I am going to suggest here is that it would be quite feasible to invent a vocabulary, perhaps amounting to several thousands of words, which would deal with parts of our experience now practically unmeanable to language. There are several objections to the idea, and I will deal with these as they arise. The first step is to indicate the kind of purpose for which new words are needed.
Everyone who thinks at all has noticed that our language is practically useless for describing anything that goes on inside the brain. This is so generally recognized that writers of high skill (e. g. Trollope and Mark Twain) will start their autobiographies by saying that they do not intend to describe their inner life, because it is of its nature indescribable. So soon as we are dealing with anything that is not concrete or visible (and even there to a great extent — look at the difficulty of describing anyone’s appearance) we find that words are no like to the reality than chessmen to living beings. To take an obvious case which will not raise side-issues, consider a dream. How do you describe a dream? Clearly you never describe it, because no words that convey the atmosphere of dreams exist in out language.
Of course, you can give a crude approximation of some of the facts in a dream. You can say ‘I dreamed that I was walking down Regent Street with a porcupine wearing a bowler hat’ etc., but this is no real description of the dream. And even if a psychologist interprets your dream in terms of ‘symbols’, he is still going largely by guesswork; for the real quality of the dream, the quality that gave the porcupine its sole significance, is outside the world of words. In fact, describing a dream is like translating a poem into the language of one of Bohn’s cribs; it is a paraphrase which is meaningless unless one knows the original.
I chose dreams as in instance that would not be disputed, but if were only dreams that were indescribable, the matter might not be worth bothering about. But, as has been pointed out over and over again, the waking mind is not so different from the dreaming mind as it appears — or as we like to pretend that it appears. It is true that most of our waking thoughts are reasonable’ — that is, there exists in our minds a kind of chessboard upon which thoughts move logically and verbally; we use this part of our minds for any straightforward intellectual problem, and we get into the habit of thinking (i.e. thinking in our chessboard moments) that it is the whole of the mind. But obviously it is not the whole. The disordered, un-verbal world belonging to dreams I never quite absent from our minds, and if any calculation were possible I dare say it would be found that quite half the volume of our waking thoughts were of this order. Certainly the dream-thoughts take a hand even when we are trying to think verbally, they influence the verbal thoughts, and it is largely they that make our inner life valuable. Examine your thought at any casual moment. The main movement in it will be a stream of nameless things — so nameless that one hardly knows whether to call them thoughts, images or feelings. In the first place there are the objects you see and the sounds you hear, which are in themselves describable in words, but which as soon as they enter your mind become something quite different and totally indescribable(1).
And besides this there is the dream-life which your mind unceasingly creates for itself — and though most of this is trivial and soon forgotten, it contains things which are beautiful, funny, etc. beyond anything that ever gets into word. In a way this un-verbal part of your mind is even the most important part for it is the source of nearly all motives. All likes and dislikes, all aesthetic feeling, all notions of right and wrong (aesthetic and moral considerations are in any case inextricable) spring from feelings which are generally admitted to be subtler than words. When you are asked ‘Why do you do, or not do, so and so?’ you are invariably ware that your real reason will not go into words, even when you have no wish to conceal it; consequently you rationalize your conduct, more or less dishonestly. I don’t know whether everyone would admit this, and it is a fact that some people seem unaware of being influenced by their inner life, or even of having any inner. I notice that many people never laugh when they are alone and I suppose that if a man doesn’t laugh when he is alone his inner life must be relatively barren. Still, every at all individual man has an inner life, and is aware of the practical impossibility of understanding others or being understood — in general, of the star-like isolation in which human beings live. Nearly all literature is an attempt to escape from this isolation by round — about means the direct means (words in their primary meanings) being almost useless.
‘Imaginative’ writing is as it were a flank-attack upon positions that are impregnable from the front. A writer attempting anything that is not coldly ‘intellectual’ can do very little with words in their primary meanings. He gets his effect, if at all, by using words in a tricky roundabout way, relying on their cadences and so forth, as in speech he would rely upon tone and gesture. In the case of poetry this is too well known to be worth arguing about. No one with the smallest understanding of poetry supposed that
The mortal moon bath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage
really means what the words ‘mean’ in their dictionary-sense. (The couplet is said to refer to Queen Elizabeth having got over her grand climacteric safely.) The dictionary-meaning has, as nearly always, something to do with the real meaning, but not more than the ‘anecdote’ of a picture has to do with its design. And it is the same with prose, mutatis mutandis. Consider a novel, even a novel which has ostensibly nothing to do with the inner life — what is called a ‘straight story’. Consider Manon Lescaut. Why does the author invent this long rigmarole about an unfaithful girl and a runaway abbé? Because he has a certain feeling, vision, whatever you like to call it, and knows, possibly after experiment, that it is no use trying to convey this vision by describing it as one would describe a crayfish for a book of zoology. But by not describing it, by inventing something else (in this case a picaresque novel: in another age he would choose another form) he can convey it, or part of it.
The art of writing is in fact largely the perversion of words, and I would even say that the less obvious this perversion is, the more thoroughly it has been done. For a writer who seems to twist words out of their meanings (e. g. Gerard Manley Hopkins) is really, if one looks closely, making a desperate attempt to use them straightforwardly. Whereas a writer who seems to have no tricks whatever, for instance the old ballad writers, is making an especially subtle flank-attack, though, in the case of the ballad writers, this is no doubt unconscious. Of course one hears a lot of cant to the effect that all good art is ‘objective’ and every true artist keeps his inner life to himself. But the people who say this do not mean it. All they mean is that they want the inner life to be expressed by an exceptionally roundabout method, as in the ballad or the ‘straight story’.
The weakness of the roundabout method, apart from its difficulty, is that it usually fails. For anyone who is not a considerable artist (possibly for them too) the lumpishness of words results in constant falsification. Is there anyone who has ever written so much as a love letter in which he felt that he had said exactly what he intended? A writer falsifiers himself both intentionally and unintentionally. Intentionally, because the accidental qualities of words constantly tempt and frighten him away from his true meaning. He gets an idea, begins trying to express it, and then in the frightful mess of words that generally results, a pattern begins to form itself more or less accidentally.
It is not by any means the pattern he wants, but it is at any rate not vulgar or disagreeable; it is ‘good art’. He takes it, because ‘good art’ is a more or less mysterious gift from heaven, and it seems a pity to waste it when it presents itself. Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not? Yet if word represented meaning as fully and accurately as height multiplied by base represents the area of a parallelogram, at least the necessity for lying would never exist. And
