May 2015
Dear AP English Language and Composition Student:
This summer you are challenged to read and annotate the assigned essays thoroughly then
prepare a dialectic journal/graphic organizer for each essay.


“The Fine Art of Baloney Detection” by Carl Sagan.
“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell.
Dialectic Journal/Graphic Organizer –
A way to organize your thoughts about a specific text is to use a graphic organizer. Breaking the
text into small sections helps you notice the details in writing: specific word and sentence
choices.
You may decide how to divide the text. Use the paragraph division in the text as natural breaking
points, or perhaps consider smaller sections that reveal interesting stylistic choices. Although the
graphic organizer takes time to complete, it lets you gather a great deal of information to analyze
as you prepare to write an essay. The model graphic organizer asks you to select the text, restate
it in your own words; next you analyze how the writer makes the point and what the effect on the
reader is. Note that you become increasingly analytical as you move across the columns to the
right.
Annotated essays and dialectic journals are due on the first day of instruction. Journals are not to
exceed eight pages.
We have provided an example for you “Los Angeles Notebook” (in part) by Joan Didion.
If you have any questions over the summer, do not hesitate to email us.
Have a great summer,
Mr. Wymond, Mr. McFarlin, and Ms. Franklin
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected].
Quotation
Paraphrase or Summarization
Rhetorical Strategy or Style
Element
Effect or Function
There is something uneasy in the Los
Angeles air this afternoon, some
unnatural stillness, some tension. What
it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will
begin to blow, a hot wind from the
northeast whining down through the
Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes,
blowing up sand storms out along
route 66, drying the hills and the
nerves to flash point. I have neither
heard nor read that a Sandra Ana is
due, but I know it, and almost
everyone I have seen today knows it
too. We know it because we feel it. The
baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a
waning argument with the telephone
company, the cut my losses and lie
down, given over to whatever it is in
the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to
accept, consciously or unconsciously, a
deeply mechanistic view of human
behavior.
I recall being told, when I first moved
to Los Angeles and was living on an
isolated beach that the Indians would
throw themselves into the sea when
the bad wind blew. I could see why.
The Pacific turned ominously glossy
during a Santa Ana period, and one
woke and in the night trouble not only
by the peacocks screaming in the olive
trees but by the eerie absence of surf.
The heat was surreal. The sky had a
yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes
called “earthquake weather.” My only
neighbor would not come out of her
The winds are creepy. They bring
sand storms and cause fires.
People know they’re coming
without being told because babies
and maids act strange. The
speaker picks a fight and then
gives up. The Santa Ana winds
make us aware that human
behavior can be explained in
terms of physical causes and
processes.
Personification: the wind
whines
Giving the wind a human quality makes
it more threatening.
Cumulative sentence
Makes her point by accumulating details
about what it means that the Santa Ana
is beginning to blow.
Didion talks about her early
experiences with the winds, plus
the folklore about them. She
mentions things that seem weird –
peacocks screeching and a very
quiet ocean. She says her
neighbors are strange too; one
stays indoors, and the other walks
around with a big knife.
Two short sentences: “The
baby frets. The maid sulks”
Those simple sentences reduce human
behavior to irrefutable evidence. We
can’t argue with what we see so clearly.
“rekindle”
Though she’s talking about restarting an
argument with the phone company, the
word makes us think of starting a fire,
like the wind does up in the hills.
Subordinate clause in the
middle of that first sentence:
“when I first moved to Los
Angeles and was living on an
isolated beach.”
The clause accentuates Didion’s
isolation and because it’s so long almost
makes her experience more important
than the Indians who threw themselves
into the ocean.
“peacocks screaming in the
olive trees.”
Kind of an upside-down image.
Peacocks are usually regal and elegant;
these are screaming. Also olive trees are
associated with peace (the olive
branch). Supports the idea that Santa
Ana turns everything upside down.
“And” as the coordinating conjunction
makes the wife hiding and the husband
Compound sentence” My only
neighbor would not come out
of her house for days, and
there were no lights at night,
and her husband roamed the
Quotation
house for days, and there were no
lights at night, and her husband
roamed the place with a machete. One
day he would tell me that he had heard
a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.
“On nights like that,” Raymond
Chandler once wrote about this Santa
Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight.
Meek little wives feel the edge of the
carving knife and study their husbands’
necks. Anything can happen.” That was
the kind of wind it was. I did not know
then that there was any basis for the
effect it had on all of us, but it turns
out to be another of those cases in
which science bears out folk wisdom.
The Santa Ana, which is named for one
of the canyons it rushes through, is a
foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria
and Switzerland and the hamsin of
Israel… A few years ago an Israeli
physicist discovered that not only
during such winds, but for the ten or
twelve hours which precedes them, the
air carries an unusually high ratio of
positive to negative ions.
Paraphrase or Summarization
Rhetorical Strategy or Style
Element
Effect or Function
place with a machete.
with the machete equally important.
“machete”
“Machete” is associated with revolution
in banana republics, vigilantes. Suggests
danger.
Chandler, who wrote crime fiction, was
known for his hard-boiled style and
cynical views. The allusion to Chandler
helps create the ominous tone.
Didion quotes a writer who
describes the effects of the wind
as causing women to kill their
husbands. She says folklore
sometimes has a basis in science.
Allusions to Raymond
Chandler.
This section gives scientific facts
about the Santa Ana wind,
including its generic name, foehn.
Didion names other winds like it in
other parts of the world, but says
the foehn has its own character.
She names some of the effects the
foehn has on people in various
places.
Complex sentence: “There are
a number of persistent
malevolent winds, perhaps the
best known of which are the
mistral of France and the
Mediterranean sirocco, but a
foehn wind has distinct
characteristics: it occurs on the
leeward slope of a mountain
range and, although the air
begins as a cold mass, it is
warmed as it comes down the
mountain and appears finally
as a hot dry wind.”
The details accumulate, ending in “hot
dry wind” to create a picture of the
“persistent malevolent wind.”
The Fine Art of Baloney Detection
Carl Sagan
The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections;
whence proceed sciences which may be called “sciences as one would.” For what a man had rather
were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research;
sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light
of experience, from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to be occupied with things
mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar.
Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour
and infect the understanding.
Fr a nc i s Bacon, Novum Organon (1620)
My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to
believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are—really and truly—still in
existence somewhere. I wouldn’t ask very much, just five or ten minutes a year, say, to tell them about their
grandchildren, to catch them up on the latest news, to remind them that I love them. There’s a part of me—no
matter how childish it sounds—that wonders how they are. “Is everything all right?” I want to ask. The last words
I found myself saying to my father, at the moment of his death, were “Take care.”
Sometimes I dream that I’m talking to my parents, and suddenly—still immersed in the dreamwork—I’m
seized by the overpowering realization that they didn’t really die, that it’s all been some kind of horrible mistake.
Why, here they are, alive and well, my father making wry jokes, my mother earnestly advising me to wear a
muffler because the weather is chilly. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over
again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit
interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it.
So I don’t guffaw at the woman who visits her husband’s grave and chats him up every now and then, maybe
on the anniversary of his death. It’s not hard to understand. And if I have difficulties with the ontological status
of who she’s talking to, that’s all right. That’s not what this is about. This is about humans being human. More
than a third of American adults believe that on some level they’ve made contact with the dead. The number
seems to have jumped by 15 percent between and 1988. A quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation.
But that doesn’t mean I’d be willing to accept the pretensions of a “medium,” who claims to channel the
spirits of the dear departed, when I’m aware the practice is rife with fraud. I know how much I want to believe
that my parents have just abandoned the husks of their bodies, like insects or snakes molting, and gone
somewhere else. I understand that those very feelings might make me easy prey even for an unclever con, or for
normal people unfamiliar with their unconscious minds, or for those suffering from a dissociative psychiatric
disorder. Reluctantly, I rouse some reserves of skepticism.
How is it, I ask myself, that channelers never give us verifiable information otherwise unavailable? Why does
Alexander the Great never tell us about the exact location of his tomb, Fermat about his Last Theorem, John
Wilkes Booth about the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, Hermann Goring about the Reichstag fire? Why don’t
Sophocles, Democritus, and Aristarchus dictate their lost books? Don’t they wish future generations to have
access to their masterpieces?
If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I’d be eager to examine it; but it would have to be
real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say,
than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the
fantasy.
The fundamental premise of “channeling,” spiritualism, and other forms of necromancy is that when we die
we don’t. Not exactly. Some thinking, feeling, and remembering part of us continues. That whatever-it-is—a soul
or spirit, neither matter nor energy, but something else—can, we are told, re-enter the bodies of human and other
beings in the future, and so death loses much of its sting. What’s more, we have an opportunity, if the spiritualist
or channeling contentions are true, to make contact with loved ones who have died.
J. Z. Knight of the State of Washington claims to be in touch with a 35,000-year-old somebody called
“Ramtha.” He speaks English very well, using Knight’s tongue, lips and vocal chords, producing what sounds to
me to be an accent from the Indian Raj. Since most people know how to talk, and many—from children to
professional actors—have a repertoire of voices at their command, the simplest hypothesis is that Ms. Knight
makes “Ramtha” speak all by herself, and that she has no contact with disembodied entities from the Pleistocene
Ice Age. If there’s evidence to the contrary, I’d love to hear it. It would be considerably more impressive if Ramtha
could speak by himself, without the assistance of Ms. Knight’s mouth. Failing that, how might we test the claim?
(The actress Shirley MacLaine attests that Ramtha was her brother in Atlantis, but that’s another story.)
Suppose Ramtha were available for questioning. Could we verify whether he is who he says he is? How does
he know that he lived 35,000 years ago, even approximately? What calendar does he employ? Who is keeping
track of the intervening millennia? Thirty-five thousand plus or minus what? What were things like 35,000 years
ago? Either Ramtha really is 35,000 years old, in which case we discover something about that period, or he’s a
phony and he’ll (or rather she’ll) slip up.
Where did Ramtha live? (I know he speaks English with an Indian accent, but where 35,000 years ago did they
do that?) What was the climate? What did Ramtha eat? (Archaeologists know something about what people ate
back then.) What were the indigenous languages, and social structure? Who else did Ramtha live with—wife, wives,
children, grandchildren? What was the life cycle, the infant mortality rate, the life expectancy? Did they have birth
control? What clothes did they wear? How were the clothes manufactured? What were the most dangerous predators? Hunting and fishing implements and strategies? Weapons? Endemic sexism? Xenophobia and ethnocentrism?
And if Ramtha came from the “high civilization” of Atlantis, where are the linguistic, technological, historical and
other details? What was their writing like? Tell us. Instead, all we are offered are banal homilies.
Here, to take another example, is a set of information channeled not from an ancient dead person, but from
unknown non-human entities who make crop circles, as recorded by the journalist Jim Schnabel:
We are so anxious at this sinful nation spreading lies about us. We do not come in machines, we do
not land on your earth in machines … We come like the wind. We are Life Force. Life Force from
the ground … Come here … We are but a breath away … a breath away … we are not a million
miles away … a Life Force that is larger than the energies in your body. But we meet at a higher
level of life … We need no name. We are parallel to your world, alongside your world … The walls
are broken. Two men will rise from the past … the great bear … the world will be at peace.
People pay attention to these puerile marvels mainly because they promise something like old-time religion,
but especially life after death, even life eternal.
A very different prospect for something like eternal life was once proposed by the versatile British scientist
J.B.S. Haldane, who was, among many other things, one of the founders of population genetics. Haldane
imagined a far future when the stars have darkened and space is mainly filled with a cold, thin gas. Nevertheless,
if we wait long enough statistical fluctuations in the density of this gas will occur. Over immense periods of time
the fluctuations will be sufficient to reconstitute a Universe something like our own. If the Universe is infinitely
old, there will be an infinite number of such reconstitutions, Haldane pointed out.
So in an infinitely old universe with an infinite number of appearances of galaxies, stars, planets, and life, an
identical Earth must reappear on which you and all your loved ones will be reunited. I’ll be able to see my parents
again and introduce them to the grandchildren they never knew. And all this will happen not once, but an
infinite number of times.
Somehow, though, this does not quite offer the consolations of religion. If none of us is to have any recollection
of what happened this time around, the time the reader and I are sharing, the satisfactions of bodily resurrection, in
my ears at least, ring hollow.
But in this reflection I have underestimated what infinity means. In Haldane’s picture, there will he universes,
indeed an infinite number of them, in which our brains will have full recollection of many previous rounds.
Satisfaction is at hand—tempered, though, by the thought of all those other universes which will also come into
existence (again, not once but an infinite number of times) with tragedies and horrors vastly outstripping
anything I’ve experienced this turn.
The Consolation of Haldane depends, though, on what kind of universe we live in, and maybe on such
arcana as whether there’s enough matter to eventually reverse the expansion of the universe, and the character of
vacuum fluctuations. Those with a deep longing for life after death might, it seems, devote themselves to
cosmology, quantum gravity, elementary particle physics, and transfinite arithmetic.
——
Clement of Alexandria, a Father of the early Church, in his Exhortations to the Greeks (written around the year 190)
dismissed pagan beliefs in words that might today seem a little ironic:
Far indeed are we from allowing grown men to listen to such tales. Even to our own children, when
they are crying their heart out, as the saying goes, we are not in the habit of telling fabulous stories
to soothe them.
In our time we have less severe standards. We tell children about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the
Tooth Fairy for reasons we think emotionally sound, but then disabuse them of these myths before they’re grown.
Why retract? Because their well-being as adults depends on them knowing the world as it really is. We worry, and
for good reason, about adults who still believe in Santa Claus.
On doctrinaire religions, “Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts,” wrote the philosopher David Hume,
the doubts which they entertain on such subjects. They make a merit of implicit faith; and disguise
to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest asseverations and the most positive bigotry.
This infidelity has profound moral consequences, as the American revolutionary Tom Paine wrote in The Age
of Reason:
Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what
one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that
mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of
his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared
himself for the commission of every other crime.
T. H. Huxley’s formulation was
The foundation of morality is to … give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence,
and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.
Clement, Hume, Paine, and Huxley were all talking about religion. But much of what they wrote has more
general applications—for example to the pervasive background importunings of our commercial civilization:
There is a class of aspirin commercials in which actors pretending to be doctors reveal the competing product to
have only so much of the painkilling ingredient that doctors recommend most—they don’t tell you what the
mysterious ingredient is. Whereas their product has a dramatically larger amount (1.2 to 2 times more per tablet).
So buy their product. But why not just take two of the competing tablets? Or consider the analgesic that works
better than the “regular-strength” product of the competition. Why not then take the “extra-strength” competitive product? And of course they do not tell us of the more than a thousand deaths each year in the United States
from the use of aspirin, or the roughly 5,000 annual cases of kidney failure from the use of acetaminophen,
chiefly Tylenol. (This, however, may represent a case of corelation without causation.) Or who cares which breakfast cereal has more vitamins when we can take a vitamin pill with breakfast? Likewise, why should it matter
whether an antacid contains calcium if the calcium is for nutrition and irrelevant for gastritis? Commercial
culture is full of similar misdirections and evasions at the expense of the consumer. You’re not supposed to ask.
Don’t think. Buy.
Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception.
They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular
attitudes about scientific objectivity. Today there are even commercials in which real scientists, some of
considerable distinction, shill for corporations. They teach that scientists too will lie for money. As Tom Paine
warned, inuring us to lies lays the groundwork for many other evils.
I have in front of me as I write the program of one of the annual Whole Life Expos, New Age expositions held
in San Francisco. Typically, tens of thousands of people attend. Highly questionable experts tout highly questionable products. Here are some of the presentations: “How Trapped Blood Proteins Produce Pain and Suffering.”
“Crystals, Are They Talismans or Stones?” (I have an opinion myself.) It continues: “As a crystal focuses sound
and light waves for radio and television”—this is a vapid misunderstanding of how radio and television work—
“so may it amplify spiritual vibrations for the attuned human.” Or here’s one “Return of the Goddess, a Presentational Ritual.” Another: “Synchronicity, the Recognition Experience.” That one is given by “Brother Charles.”
Or, on the next page, “You, Saint-Germain, and Healing Through the Violet Flame.” It goes on and on, with
plenty of ads about “opportunities”—running the short gamut from the dubious to the spurious—that are
available at the Whole Life Expo.
Distraught cancer victims make pilgrimages to the Philippines, where “psychic surgeons,” having palmed bits
of chicken liver or goat heart, pretend to reach into the patient’s innards and withdraw the diseased tissue, which
is then triumphantly displayed. Leaders of Western democracies regularly consult astrologers and mystics before
making decisions of state. Under public pressure for results, police with an unsolved murder or a missing body on
their hands consult ESP “experts” (who never guess better than expected by common sense, but the police, the
ESPers say, keep calling). A clairvoyance gap with adversary nations is announced, and the Central Intelligence
Agency, under Congressional prodding, spends tax money to find out whether submarines in the ocean depths
can be located by thinking hard at them. A “psychic”—using pendulums over maps and dowsing rods in
airplanes—purports to find new mineral deposits; an Australian mining company pays him top dollar up front,
none of it returnable in the event of failure, and a share in the exploitation of ores in the event of success.
Nothing is discovered. Statues of Jesus or murals of Mary are spotted with moisture, and thousands of kindhearted people convince themselves that they have witnessed a miracle.
These are all cases of proved or presumptive baloney. A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion—wonder,
fear, greed, grief. Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that’s what P. T. Barnum meant when he
said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic—however sympathetic
we may be to those who have bought the baloney.
In science we may start with experimental results, data, observations, measurements, “facts.” We invent, if we
can, a rich array of possible explanations and systematically confront each explanation with the facts. In the
course of their training, scientists are equipped with a baloney detection kit. The kit is brought out as a matter of
course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our
kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even
when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested
method.
What’s in the kit? Tools for skeptical thinking.
What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument
and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we
like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise
or starting point and whether that premise is true.
Among the tools:
· Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
· Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
· Arguments from authority carry little weight—“authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do
so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there
are experts.
· Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in
which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the
alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among
“multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply
run with the first idea that caught your fancy.*
· Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of
knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find
reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
* This is a problem that affects jury trials. Retrospective studies show that some jurors make up their minds very early—
perhaps during opening arguments—and then retain the evidence that seems to support their initial impressions and reject
the contrary evidence. The method of alternative working hypotheses is not running in their heads.
·
Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it,
you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is
open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are
obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
· If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise)—not just most of
them.
· Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the
data equally well to choose the simpler.
· Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable,
unfalsifiable, are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an
elementary particle—an electron, say—in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information
from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out.
Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and
see if they get the same result.
The reliance on carefully designed and controlled experiments is key, as I tried to stress earlier. We will not
learn much from mere contemplation. It is tempting to rest content with the first candidate explanation we can
think of. One is much better than none. But what happens if we can invent several? How do we decide among
them? We don’t. We let experiment do it. Francis Bacon provided the classic reason:
Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work, since the subtlety of Nature is greater
many times than the subtlety of argument.
Control experiments are essential. If, for example, a new medicine is alleged to cure a disease 20 percent of the
time, we must make sure that a control population, taking a dummy sugar pill which as far as the subjects know
might be the new drug, does not also experience spontaneous remission of the disease 20 percent of the time.
Variables must be separated. Suppose you’re seasick, and given both an acupressure bracelet and 50 milligrams
of meclizine. You find the unpleasantness vanishes. What did it—the bracelet or the pill? You can tell only if you
take the one without the other, next time you’re seasick. Now imagine that you’re not so dedicated to science as to
be willing to be seasick. Then you won’t separate the variables. You’ll take both remedies again. You’ve achieved
the desired practical result; further knowledge, you might say, is not worth the discomfort of attaining it.
Often the experiment must be done “double-blind,” so that those hoping for a certain finding are not in the
potentially compromising position of evaluating the results. In testing a new medicine, for example, you might
want the physicians who determine which patients’ symptoms are relieved not to know which patients have been
given the new drug. The knowledge might influence their decision, even if only unconsciously. Instead the list of
those who experienced remission of symptoms can be compared with the list of those who got the new drug, each
independently ascertained. Then you can determine what correlation exists. Or in conducting a police lineup or
photo identification, the officer in charge should not know who the prime suspect is, so as not consciously or
unconsciously to influence the witness.
——
In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit
must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and
rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged
to justify two contradictory propositions. Among these fallacies are:
· ad hominem—Latin for “to the man,” attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr.
Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously);
· argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end
the war in Southeast Asia—but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its
merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out);
* A more cynical formulation by the Roman historian Polybius: Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly
desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well,
therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.
·
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argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if
He didn’t, society would be much more lawless and dangerous—perhaps even ungovernable.* Or: The defendant
in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men
to murder their wives);
appeal to ignorance—the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g.,
There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist—and there is
intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known
to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we’re still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God
condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple?
Special plead: you don’t understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don’t understand the Divine Mystery of the
Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each in their own way
enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion—to have perpetrated so much cruelty for so long?
Special plead: You don’t understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in mysterious ways.)
begging the question, also called assuming the answer (e.g., We must institute the death penalty to discourage
violent crime. But does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is imposed? Or: The stock
market fell yesterday because of a technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors—but is there any
independent evidence for the causal role of “adjustment” and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all
from this purported explanation?);
observational selection, also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher
Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses* (e.g., A state boasts of the Presidents
it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers);
statistics of small numbers—a close relative of observational selection (e.g., “They say 1 out of every 5 people
is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly.” Or: “I’ve
thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can’t lose.”);
misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment
and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);
inconsistency (e.g., Prudently plan for the worst of which a potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily
ignore scientific projections on environmental dangers because they’re not “proved.” Or: Attribute the declining
life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the
high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of
capitalism. Or: Consider it reasonable for the Universe to continue to exist forever into the future, but judge
absurd the possibility that it has infinite duration into the past);
non sequitur—Latin for “It doesn’t follow” (e.g., Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly
every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was “Gott mit uns”). Often those falling into
the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities;
post hoc, ergo propter hoc—Latin for “It happened after, so it was caused by” (e.g., Jaime Cardinal Sin,
Archbishop of Manila: “I know of … a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills.” Or:
Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons);
* My favorite example is this story, told about the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted
in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the midst of World War II with U.S. flag officers.
So-and-so is a great general, he was told. What is the definition of a great general? Fermi characteristically
asked. I guess it’s a general who’s won many consecutive battles. How many? After some back and forth, they
settled on five. What fraction of American generals are great? After some more back and forth, they settled on
a few percent.
But imagine, Fermi rejoined, that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that
winning a battle is purely a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle is one out of two, or 1/2, two battles
l/4, three l/8, four l/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32—which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of
American generals to win five consecutive battles—purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles … ?
·
excluded middle, or false dichotomy—considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate
possibilities (e.g., “Sure, take his side; my husband’s perfect; I’m always wrong.” Or: “Either you love your
country or you hate it.” Or: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”);
· short-term vs. long-term—a subset of the excluded middle, but so important I’ve pulled it out for special
attention (e.g., We can’t afford programs to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to
urgently deal with crime on the streets. Or: Why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so
huge a budget deficit?);
· slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e.g., If we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be
impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: If the state prohibits abortion even in the
ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception);
· confusion of correlation and causation (e.g., A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than
those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or: Andean earthquakes are correlated with
closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore—despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer,
more massive planet Jupiter—the latter causes the former*);
· straw man—caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., Scientists suppose that living things
simply fell together by chance—a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight that
Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn’t. Or—this is also a short-term/longterm fallacy—environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people);
· suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly accurate and widely quoted “prophecy” of the
assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but—an important detail—was it recorded
before or after the event? Or: These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can’t make an omelette
without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than
under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions
against oppressive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people?);
· weasel words (e.g., The separation of powers of the U.S. Constitution specifies that the United States may
not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of
foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting themselves reelected. Presidents of either political party may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag
and calling the wars something else—“police actions,” “armed incursions,” “protective reaction strikes,”
“pacification,” “safeguarding American interests,” and a wide variety of “operations,” such as “Operation
Just Cause.” Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, “An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under
old names have become odious to the public”).
Knowing the existence of such logical and rhetorical fallacies rounds out our toolkit. Like all tools, the
baloney detection kit can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking.
But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world—not least in evaluating our own arguments
before we present them to others.
——
The American tobacco industry grosses some $50 billion per year. There is a statistical correlation between
smoking and cancer, the tobacco industry admits, but not, they say, a causal relation. A logical fallacy, they imply,
is being committed. What might this mean? Maybe people with hereditary propensities for cancer also have
hereditary propensities to take addictive drugs - so cancer and smoking might be correlated, but the cancer would
not be caused by the smoking. Increasingly farfetched connections of this sort can be contrived. This is exactly
one of the reasons science insists on control experiments.
* Children who watch violent TV programs tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence,
or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programs? Very likely both are true. Commercial defenders of TV
violence argue that anyone can distinguish between television and reality. But Saturday morning children’s programs now
average 25 acts of violence per hour. At the very least this desensitizes young children to aggression and random cruelty. And
if impressionable adults can have false memories implanted in their brains, what are we implanting in our children when we
expose them to some 100,000 acts of violence before they graduate from elementary school?
Suppose you paint the backs of large numbers of mice with cigarette tar, and also follow the health of large
numbers of nearly identical mice that have not been painted. If the former get cancer and the latter do not, you
can be pretty sure that the correlation is causal. Inhale tobacco smoke, and the chance of getting cancer goes up;
don’t inhale, and the rate stays at the background level. Likewise for emphysema, bronchitis, and cardiovascular
diseases.
When the first work was published in the scientific literature in 1953 showing that the substances in cigarette
smoke when painted on the backs of rodents produce malignancies, the response of the six major tobacco
companies was to initiate a public relations campaign to impugn the research, sponsored by the Sloan Kettering
Foundation. This is similar to what the Du Pont Corporation did when the first research was published in 1974
showing that their Freon product attacks the protective ozone layer. There are many other examples.
You might think that before they denounce unwelcome research findings, major corporations would devote
their considerable resources to checking out the safety of the products they propose to manufacture. And if they
missed something, if independent scientists suggest a hazard, why would the companies protests? Would they
rather kill people than lose profits? If, in an uncertain world, an error must be made, shouldn’t it be biasing
toward protecting customers and the public?
A 1971 internal report of the Brown and Williamson tobacco Corporation lists as a corporate objective “to set
aside in the minds of millions the false conviction that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases; a
conviction based on fanatical assumptions, fallacious rumors, unsupported claims and the unscientific statements
and conjectures of publicity-seeking opportunists.” They complain of
the incredible, unprecedented and nefarious attack against the cigarette, constituting the greatest
libel and slander ever perpetrated against any product in the history of free enterprise; a criminal
libel of such major proportions and implications that one wonders how such a crusade of calumny
can be reconciled under the Constitution can be so flouted and violated [sic].
This rhetoric is only slightly more inflamed than what the tobacco industry has from time to time uttered for
public consumption.
There are many brands of cigarettes that advertise low “tar” (ten milligrams or less per cigarette). Why is this a
virtue? Because it is the refractory tars in which the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and some other carcinogens
are concentrated. Aren’t the low-tar ads a tacit admission by the tobacco companies that cigarettes indeed cause
cancer?
Healthy Buildings International is a for-profit organization, recipient of millions of dollars over the years from
the tobacco industry. It performs research on second-hand smoke, and testifies for the tobacco companies. In
1994, three of its technicians complained that senior executives had faked data on inhalable cigarette particles in
the air. In every case, the invented or “corrected” data made tobacco smoke seem safer than the technicians’
measurements had indicated. Do corporate research departments or outside research contractors ever find a
product to be more dangerous than the tobacco corporation has publicly declared? If they do, is their employment continued?
Tobacco is addictive; by many criteria more so than heroin and cocaine. There was a reason people would, as
the 1940s ad put it, “walk a mile for a Camel.” More people have died of tobacco than in all of World War II.
According to the World Health Organization, smoking kills three million people every year worldwide. This will
rise to ten million annual deaths by 2020—in part because of a massive advertising campaign to portray smoking
as advanced and fashionable to young women in the developing world. Part of the success of the tobacco industry
in purveying this brew of addictive poisons can be attributed to widespread unfamiliarity with baloney detection,
critical thinking, and the scientific method. Gullibility kills.
Politics and the English Language
by George Orwell
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
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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 henhouse. 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 wornout metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save
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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 deformations, 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
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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 a 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. 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.
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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") 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
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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:
1.
2.
3.
4.
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:
1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. 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. 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 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 "party 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
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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
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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,
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
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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:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to
seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of
an everyday English equivalent.
6. 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.
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