Poor Thoughts and Poor Language

Jonah Goldberg has a great piece titled Orwell's Orphans: The Meaning of Meaningless Jargon. The heart of the problem with modern "intellectual thought and writing" is that they are so painfully bad that they reinforce each other.

I say that if George Orwell were alive today, he would beat these people into submission with a London phonebook.

Why drag Orwell into this? Well, because he is the secular saint of clean writing and clear thinking.

Orwell argued that bad thinking and bad language are, in the parlance of today's twelve-step culture, mutual enablers. "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks," Orwell noted by way of illustration. The English language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

This was especially true in the realm of political speech. He noted in his brilliant 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" that "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." The "transfer of populations" or the "elimination of unreliable elements" were, for example, what people say when they really mean, "I believe in killing my opponents when I can get good results by doing so."

Go read the whole thing.