Posted in Articles

George Orwell worried about polluted language misleading people, but Nicholas Lemann believes polluted information is more dangerous. Read his thought provoking essay, "The Limits of Clear Language."

One passage regarding the manipulative nature of using emotional language I thought was important:

"There is nothing wrong with Orwell’s advice in “Politics and the English Language”: simple is better than complicated; concrete is better than abstract; careful is better than sloppy; think before you write. The experience of the last few years would lead me to add that in political language, function is far preferable to emotion: the words used to denote something the government does should have to do with the activity itself, not the values it is meant to embody or the feelings it is meant to activate. (The war in Iraq, yes; Operation Enduring Freedom, no.)"

The focal point of the essay is this:

"To my mind, an even more frightening political prospect than the corruption of language is the corruption of information. Language, especially in the age of the Internet, is accessible to everybody. Some users of language are more powerful than others, some are more honest than others, and some are more adept than others—but the various ways of speaking about politics can at least compete with each other in the public square, and we can at least hope that the more honest and clear ways will triumph in the end. Information, on the other hand, is much less generally accessible than words. When the process of determining whether the facts of a situation have been intentionally corrupted by people in power (whether, let’s say, Saddam Hussein had the ability to produce nuclear weapons, or whether a new drug has harmful side effects), there often is no corrective mechanism at hand, as there is in cases of the intentional corruption of language. Intellectual honesty about the gathering and use of facts and data is a riskier and more precious part of a free society than is intellectual honesty in language. We ought to guard it with the same zeal that animates Orwell’s work on political speech."