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‘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

George Orwell

‘His one real regret was that he had saved David Frost from drowning…’

Alan Bennett on Peter Cook, at the latter’s funeral

In his justly celebrated post-World War II essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell subjects a series of badly written paragraphs to in-depth analysis. Some are academic in origin, some are propagandist in intent, but most blur the boundaries between these two supposedly separate fields of human endeavour, contributing to an environment wherein (to repeat the above quote for maximum rhetorical impact) ‘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’.

Orwell’s aim in highlighting the widespread use of clichés and jargon⁴⁹ is not only to highlight the poverty of linguistic expression involved, but also to reveal a more sinister subtext. ‘Such phraseology’, he maintains, ‘is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures.’ He goes on to establish this degraded form of language – saying things in such a way as to conceal the reality behind the words – as a vital component of totalitarianisms of both left and right.

In outlining his response to those who express themselves in such a way, Orwell uses an image which will be familiar to readers of Henri Bergson. When he writes of ‘a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy’, he overlaps with the latter’s idea of the fundamental basis of all human hilarity. But much as George Orwell loved a laugh in his private life, he does not exploit the shortcomings of his linguistic inferiors for specifically comic effect.