Propaganda and Demotic Speech, George Orwell
Propaganda and Demotic Speech
Persuasion, Summer Quarter, 1944, 2, No. 2
When I was leaving England for Morocco at the end of 1938, some of the people in my village (less than fifty miles from London)1 wanted to know whether it would be necessary to cross the sea to get there. In 1940, during General Wavell’s African campaign, I discovered that the woman from whom I bought my rations thought Cyrenaica was in Italy. A year or two ago a friend of mine, who had been giving an A.B.C.A. lecture to some A.T.s, tried the experiment of asking them a few general knowledge questions: among the answers he got were, (a) that there are only six Members of Parliament, and (b) that Singapore is the capital of India. If there were any point in doing so I could give many more instances of this kind of thing. I mention these three, simply as a preliminary reminder of the ignorance which any speech or piece of writing aimed at a large public has to take into account.
However, when you examine Government leaflets and White Papers, or leading articles in the newspapers, or the speeches and broadcasts of politicians, or the pamphlets and manifestos of any political party whatever, the thing that nearly always strikes you is their remoteness from the average man. It is not merely that they assume non-existent knowledge: often it is right and necessary to do that. It is also that clear, popular, everyday language seems to be instinctively avoided. The bloodless dialect of Government spokesmen (characteristic phrases are: in due course, no stone unturned, take the earliest opportunity, the answer is in the affirmative) is too well known to be worth dwelling on. Newspaper leaders are written either in this same dialect or in an inflated bombastic style with a tendency to fall back on archaic words (peril, valour, might, foe, succour, vengeance, dastardly, rampart, bulwark, bastion) which no normal person would ever think of using.
Left-wing political parties specialise in a bastard vocabulary made up of Russian and German phrases translated with the maximum of clumsiness. And even posters, leaflets and broadcasts which are intended to give instructions, to tell people what to do in certain circumstances, often fail in their effect. For example, during the first air raids on London, it was found that innumerable people did not know which siren meant the Alert and which the All Clear. This was after months or years of gazing at A.R.P. posters. These posters had described the Alert as a «warbling note»: a phrase which made no impression, since air-raid sirens don’t warble, and few people attach any definite meaning to the word.
When Sir Richard Acland, in the early months of the war, was drawing up a Manifesto to be presented to the Government, he engaged a squad of Mass Observers to find out what meaning, if any, the ordinary man attaches to the high-sounding abstract words which are flung to and fro in politics. The most fantastic misunderstandings came to light. It was found, for instance, that most people don’t know that «immorality» means anything besides sexual immorality.* One man thought that «movement» had something to do with constipation. And it is a nightly experience in any pub to see broadcast speeches and news bulletins make no impression on the average listener, because they are uttered in stilted bookish language and, incidentally, in an upper-class accent.
At the time of Dunkirk I watched a gang of navvies eating their bread and cheese in a pub while the one o’clock news came over. Nothing registered: they just went on stolidly eating. Then, just for an instant, reporting the words of some soldier who had been hauled aboard a boat, the announcer dropped into spoken English, with the phrase, «Well, I’ve learned to swim this trip, anyway!» Promptly you could see ears being pricked up: it was ordinary language, and so it got across. A few weeks later, the day after Italy entered the war, Duff-Cooper announced that Mussolini’s rash act would «add to the ruins for which Italy has been famous.» It was neat enough, and a true prophecy, but how much impression does that kind of language make on nine people out of ten? The colloquial version of it would have been: «Italy has always been famous for ruins. Well, there are going to be a damn’ sight more of them now.» But that is not how Cabinet Ministers speak, at any rate in public.
Examples of futile slogans, obviously incapable of stirring strong feelings or being circulated by word of mouth, are: «Deserve Victory,» «Freedom is in Peril. Defend it with all your Might,» «Socialism the only Solution,» «Expropriate the Expropriators,» «Austerity,» «Evolution not Revolution,» «Peace is Indivisible.» Examples of slogans phrased in spoken English are: «Hands off Russia,» «Make Germany Pay,» «Stop Hitler,» «No Stomach Taxes,» «Buy a Spitfire,» «Votes for Women.» Examples about mid-way between these two classes are: «Go To It,» «Dig for Victory,» «It all depends on Me,» and some of Churchill’s phrases, such as «the end of the beginning,» «soft underbelly,» «blood, toil, tears and sweat,» and «never was so much owed by so many to so few.» (Significantly, in so far as this last saying has been repeated by word of mouth, the bookish phrase in the field of human conflict has dropped out of it.)
One has to take into account the fact that nearly all English people dislike anything that sounds high-flown and boastful. Slogans like «They shall not pass,» or «Better to die on your feet than live on your knees,» which have thrilled continental nations, seem slightly embarrassing to an Englishman, especially a working man. But the main weakness of propagandists and popularisers is their failure to notice that spoken and written English are two different things.
When recently I protested in print against the Marxist dialect which makes use of phrases like «objectively counter-revolutionary left-deviationism» or «drastic liquidation of petty-bourgeois elements,» I received indignant letters from lifelong Socialists who told me that I was «insulting the language of the proletariat.» In rather the same spirit, Professor Harold Laski devotes a long passage in his last book, Faith, Reason and Civilisation, to an attack on Mr. T. S. Eliot, whom he accuses of «writing only for a few.» Now Eliot, as it happens, is one of the few writers of our time who have tried seriously to write English as it is spoken. Lines like—
«And nobody came, and nobody went,
But he took in the milk and he paid the rent»
are about as near to spoken English as print can come. On the other hand, here is an entirely typical sentence from Laski’s own writing:
«As a whole, our system was a compromise between democracy in the political realm—itself a very recent development in our history—and an economic power oligarchically organised which was in its turn related to a certain aristocratic vestigia still able to influence profoundly the habits of our society.»
This sentence, incidentally, comes from a reprinted lecture; so one must assume that Professor Laski actually stood up on a platform and spouted it forth, parenthesis and all. It is clear that people capable of speaking or writing in such a way have simply forgotten what everyday language is like. But this is nothing to some of the other passages I could dig out of Professor Laski’s writings, or better still, from Communist literature, or best of all, from Trotskyist pamphlets. Indeed, from reading the Left-wing press you get the impression that the louder people yap about the proletariat, the more they despise its language.
I have said already that spoken English and written English are two different things. This variation exists in all languages, but is probably greater in English than in most. Spoken English is full of slang, it is abbreviated wherever possible, and people of all social classes treat its grammar and syntax in a slovenly way. Extremely few English people ever button up a sentence if they are speaking extempore. Above all, the vast English vocabulary contains thousands of words which everyone uses when writing, but which have no real currency in speech: and it also contains thousands more which are really obsolete but which are dragged forth by anyone who wants to sound clever or uplifting. If one keeps this in mind, one can think of ways of ensuring that propaganda, spoken or written, shall reach the audience it is aimed at.
So far as writing goes, all one can attempt is a process of simplification. The first step—and any social survey organisation could do this for a few hundreds or thousands of pounds—is to find out which of the abstract words habitually used by politicians are really understood by large numbers of people. If phrases like «unprincipled violation of declared pledges» or «insidious threat to the basic principles of democracy» don’t mean anything to the average man, then it is stupid to use them. Secondly, in writing one can keep the spoken word constantly in mind. To get genuine spoken English on to paper is a complicated matter, as I shall show in a moment. But if you habitually say to yourself, «Could I simplify this? Could I make it more like speech?,» you are not likely to produce sentences like the one quoted from Professor Laski above: nor are you likely to say «eliminate» when you mean kill, or «static water» when you mean fire tank.
Spoken propaganda, however, offers greater possibilities of improvement. It is here that the problem of writing in spoken English really arises.
Speeches, broadcasts, lectures and even sermons are normally
