[A]ll Nunberg can think to do is claim for the left an advantage that is irrelevant to his book's project: "Liberals have a linguistic advantage of their own, in the form of truth." That is to say (and he says it), the right's success is built on a structure of "distortions." "We" are truth tellers; "they" are political liars.Perhaps Orwell's essay fails to impress Nunberg and Fish because, over time, we citizens have gotten deeply in touch with our natural human revulsion for elaborate euphemisms and bureaucratese. The last sentence of Orwell's essay is: "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." Maybe enough time has passed, and we've absorbed his lesson. The jeering has gotten easy and reflexive. We forthrightly love straight talk these days, and we're not bamboozled by, but instinctively mistrust those who get caught up roundabout rhetoric -- as Senator Kerry learned in the last election.
This notion is particularly odd given an earlier section of the book in which Nunberg does a nice critical number on what is surely the most overrated essay in the modern canon, George Orwell's turgid, self-righteous and philosophically hopeless "Politics and the English Language." Commenting on Orwell's distinction between words politically inflected and words that plainly name things, Nunberg points out that plain language is as political as any other and will probably be all the more effective because it "seems to correspond to concrete perception." The point, as he has been saying all along, is not to strip all of the political overlay from your language but to make the language that carries your political message the lingua franca of the public sphere.
Dammit, I love the old Orwell essay.
Let's all go read it again. Or just read Orwell's great set of writing rules:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.We've seen it before, but it's still helpful. (Now let me read this one more time before posting and see if I can find some words to cut.)
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Posts
19 comments:
I assign that essay in my freshman writing classes for that "great set of writing rules." I have no hope of getting them to read Strunk and White, but Orwell targets the essentials, in a clear, understandable way, and with a good argument for what he presents.
Damn it-I'm a sushi-eating, latte drinking, Volvo admiring, Prius-a-wanting, Goldwater Practicalarian.
Josil: All the law schools I've known teach students to write clearly. Maybe you're talking about some contracts and forms you've seen, but legal writing is supposed to be very sharp and effective. It's not about saying things like hereinbeforetoafter.
Ann I came to your blog for the pictures of Madison (so I'm shallow). I return for the quality of the writing by both you and your commenters.
As a poor writer trying to improve, I especially appreciate this post. Thank you Ann
Well, Professor Fish seems to have falled into the time-honoured academic trap of not bothering to critique the essay Orwell actually wrote. Orwell himself acknowledged over and again, that every point he made was far from exhaustively addressed and was wide open to objection; and that Orwell was as far as you can get from an academic literary critic or political scientist. Perhaps that's a little unnerving to a dedicated follower of academic fashion like Professor Fish?
"Geoffrey Nunberg's "Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show."
Conservatives turned "Liberalism" into that stereotype? How like the stereotypical liberal to blame their problematic image on someone else.
No political philosophy has a monopoly on truth. I distrust and dislike people who love ideological monikers more than they love truth.
And is Stanley Fish just bitter because few writing professors assign his work to students? Elizabeth, I adore Strunk and White; amazing to me that students would be resistant to it. Well... being a teacher myself, sadly it's not amazing to me that students would resist anything assigned to them, entertaining or not.
For those who care about such things be sure to pick up the 3rd edition of The Elements of Style. The 4th edition was made more politically correct and less elegant.
Ah. Yet another book retreading the theme that conservatives win because of false consciousness.
Maybe the image of the elitist liberal is not a creation of the Right? Maybe it's instead the natural human reaction to being called a gullible fool by liberals for literally decades?
Nah. If that were the case, then the left would bear some blame for its own failures, and that can't be true. It's all those devious right-wingers!
Well, this is weird. Geoff was a high school classmate of mine, and seems trapped in a cage of massive denial. Sure, words matter, but conservatives didn't capture the word "values" simply by being the first to use the term to signify traditional American, er, values.
Well, I won't go on because I don't read Geoff's stuff and thus can't comment too much. But I am very distrustful of those who say that conservatives have "won" (yeah, right), not because of actual ideas or desires for how things ought to be, but because of tricks, linguistic or otherwise.
Are we to believe those guys over at National Review have just spent the last 50 years thinking of clever phrasings?
Orwell was a socialist, but he hated what socialism invariably becomes: Stalinism.
I spent an hour reading Part 1 of 1984 tonight, thanks to the site Ann linked to. Are 1984 and Animal Farm still required reading in public schools? I hope they are, although I suspect these two books have been weeded out.
Just wrote a post about this:
http://louminatti.blogspot.com/2006/07/george-orwell.html
I just checked my local ISD and Animal Farm isn't mentioned for junior high kids. I think that is sad.
http://www.katyisd.org/files/curriculum/library/Elem_Summer_Reading_6th.pdf
Palladian, I think I'll make a stab at getting The Elements of Style adopted in our freshman classes sometime in the future. We use it in more advanced writing classes, and if I recall correctly, I discovered it a couple of years into college, on the advice of a philosophy professor.
With freshmen, a large part of my goal is to help them see writing as something that's within their grasp, and a useful tool for understanding ideas, their own and those they encounter in school and the world. Some students are ready to grabble with style, but generally, it's one of the elements that marks a B and A student from a C student.
lou: most of my students are public school grads, or from run-of-the-mill Catholic schools, and yes, invariabley a few students recognize Orwell as "the guy who wrote 1984."
For anyone who doesn't know it, may I recommend Gowers:-
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/gowerse/complete/index.htm.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/
smartboard/shop/
gowerse/complete/index.htm.
is worth a look as a source of advice on writing
George Lakoff was the first thing I thought of, too. The idea that you can take a concept and get people to like it simply by changing the name is absurd.
Well, on the face of it, it may seem absurd, but as an idea, it fits back with a broader concern (on both the Left and the Right) about controlling the frame of discourse.
Conservatives engage in this kind of meta fight about who gets to define the terms of discourse too. See, e.g. Ramesh Ponnuru's recent book -- he calls it Party of Death, not something more neutral, like, say, Abortion and its Discontents or whatever. And there is a concern among conservative abortion activists that news papers refer to them as "anti-abortion," rather than their preferred term -- "pro-life." Again with the newspapers, conservatives will sometimes go through and count the number of times conservatives or conservative organisations are referenced with a "right-wing" or "conservative" descriptor, and compare that against the number of times liberals or left-wing organisations are mentioned, and complain of bias when conservative organisations are categorised by ideology and liberal organisations are not. Why? Because they think they are at a disadvantage in the public debate, when their side (our side) gets stuck as the "conservative" view, and the other side is presented as a neutral view. This is the same kind of concern about framing that Nunberg and Lakoff are pointing to.
Of course, Lakoff certainly takes it much, much further -- I like his work generally, but his political analogies are awfully forced (and his political advice pretty useless). And I expect Nunberg does the same, although I have not read this particular book. But the basic concern about framing the discourse is one shared by conservatives. It's not this loony delusion left-wing linguistics professors cooked up all by themselves.
"I know why were not reaching the public, weren't not convoluted enough."
Lou, I don't know about required reading, but we were assigned to read Animal Farm in elemetry.
dklittle,
"Flip-flop", "Death tax", "Pro-life", "Activist judges", "Tax relief" and "Fight them over there and not here"
These are all counter examples. The phrases were exhausted before they were even popular at the conventions. When people hear them, they tune out (knowing that the speaker is just reframing). They don't convince, they reinforce. Those words only spoke to the converted. It was only pols that thought they were clever, everyone else thought it was cute that the pols thought they were clever.
I have no hope of getting them to read Strunk and White
Strunk and White was required reading during my senior year at an (unusually good) public high school. To my surprise, I loved it.
Post a Comment