How come this blog won’t remember my info? I keep clicking that damn checkbox to no effect.
I read Orwell’s essay last night. Quite impressive, but I didn’t immediately understand some of his criticisms. I did later on, and would like to share.
One thing that I had a revelation about is this pair of equivalent passages:
“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.”
“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.”
At first, I didn’t understand why Orwell thought that the second passage conveys only part of the meaning of the first. But later, I imagined each of them read by someone. The Bible quote was read with feeling by a beautiful woman. The modern pretentious BS was read by Microsoft Dave. The first evoked images of an army defeated because of bad luck and a wiseman who died poor because his ideas fell on deaf ears. The second didn’t evoke any images or emotions.
And I realized that such abstract writing is dangerous because of this quality: it transmits all the information, and may make perfect sense, but creates no emotions. You can describe cities being burned to the ground like this, and people will react to this description as “somebody else’s problem” or “necessary sacrifice”.
But concrete imagery is not a cure-all:
“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.”
Lots of imagery here, and it does provoke emotions. But the problem is that 90% of it is trite slogans. They already have a predetermined value: revolution good, bourgeoise ungood. If you avoid triteness and invent your own metaphors, people will actually have to decide whether your metaphor resembles what you’re describing.
Also, I think that the word “clarity”, if it was meant to convey what I wrote above, ironically doesn’t do so very clearly. It suggests that you’re fine as long as your words are easy to parse.
How come this blog won’t remember my info? I keep clicking that damn checkbox to no effect.
I read Orwell’s essay last night. Quite impressive, but I didn’t immediately understand some of his criticisms. I did later on, and would like to share.
One thing that I had a revelation about is this pair of equivalent passages:
“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.”
“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.”
At first, I didn’t understand why Orwell thought that the second passage conveys only part of the meaning of the first. But later, I imagined each of them read by someone. The Bible quote was read with feeling by a beautiful woman. The modern pretentious BS was read by Microsoft Dave. The first evoked images of an army defeated because of bad luck and a wiseman who died poor because his ideas fell on deaf ears. The second didn’t evoke any images or emotions.
And I realized that such abstract writing is dangerous because of this quality: it transmits all the information, and may make perfect sense, but creates no emotions. You can describe cities being burned to the ground like this, and people will react to this description as “somebody else’s problem” or “necessary sacrifice”.
But concrete imagery is not a cure-all:
“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.”
Lots of imagery here, and it does provoke emotions. But the problem is that 90% of it is trite slogans. They already have a predetermined value: revolution good, bourgeoise ungood. If you avoid triteness and invent your own metaphors, people will actually have to decide whether your metaphor resembles what you’re describing.
Also, I think that the word “clarity”, if it was meant to convey what I wrote above, ironically doesn’t do so very clearly. It suggests that you’re fine as long as your words are easy to parse.