Some while ago, with reference to Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English language", I addressed the language of the internet, an issue that stubbornly refuses to go away. Perhaps now, more than ever, we need to consider afresh what's happening to English prose in cyberspace.
To paraphrase Orwell, the English of the world wide web – loose, informal, and distressingly dyspeptic – is not really the kind people want to read in a book, a magazine, or even a newspaper. But there's an assumption that that, because it's part of the all-conquering internet, we cannot do a thing about it. Twenty-first century civilisation has been transformed in a way without precedent since the invention of moveable type. English prose, so one argument runs, must adapt to the new lexicon with all its grammatical violations and banality. Language is normative; it has – some will say – no choice. The violence the internet does to the English language is simply the cost of doing business in the digital age.
From this, any struggle against the abuse and impoverishment of English online (notably, in blogs and emails) becomes what Orwell called "a sentimental archaism". Behind this belief lies the recognition that language is a natural growth and not an instrument we can police for better self-expression. To argue differently is to line up behind Jonathan Swift and the prescriptivists (see Swift's essay "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue").
If you refer to "Politics and the English Language" (a famous essay actually commissioned for in-house consumption by Orwell's boss, the Observer editor David Astor) you will find that I have basically adapted his more general concerns about language to the machinations of cyberspace and the ebb and flow of language on the internet.
And why not? First, he puts it very well. Second, among Orwell's heirs (the writers, bloggers and journalists of today), there's still a subconscious, half-admitted anxiety about what's happening to English prose in the unpoliced cyber-wilderness. This, too, is a recurrent theme with deep roots. As long ago as 1946, Orwell said that English was "in a bad way". Look it up: the examples he cited are both amusingly archaic, but also appropriately gruesome.
Sixty-something years on, in 2013, quite a lot of people would probably concede a similar anxiety: or at least some mild dismay at the overall crassness of English prose in the age of global communications.
Orwell's polemical reach runs out, appropriately, soon after the 1980s. Then, the biggest paradigm shift since Gutenberg and Caxton took us into uncharted waters, on which we are now, very slowly, orienting ourselves. Until very recently, we were so lost (and at sea) in the fog of digital transformation that very few were willing to get to grips with the problem of online literary standards. Or, to put it another way, we became so exhilarated by the freedom of the new media that we weren't willing to grapple with the responsibilities that came with liberation.
Not any more. Those first, heady days are done. It's time for a new covenant. Yes, it's one that can take inspiration from Orwell's celebrated polemic. It's also good to set his call to arms next to the practices of online English prose because, among the guardians of contemporary culture (cyber and otherwise), the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a talisman. Those who assert the "democratic" and "free" qualities of the worldwide web would probably cite his famous essay with approval in any discussion of English usage today.
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Great stuff:
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
@Glimmer - The fact that The Guardian is featuring this essay is a great cause for hope.
Not least because, of all the online news outlets I read daily, The Graun is by far the worst offender when it comes to publishing articles with mangled, garbled prose, and/or evidence of gross confusion over the function of basic items of punctuation.
I won't claim I'm perfect; but a newspaper presumably pays an editor to copy-check what they publish - whereas by the time I'm moved to comment, I've usually had a jar or two or ale.
I'll slink back to my box, now. With my glass...
@Glimmer - Plus ça change!
@cricketed 21 May 2013 5:04am. Get cifFix for Chrome.
Cheers!
I think Orwell would have frowned on your semicolon there although you did indemnify yourself in the statement preceding it. I hadn't read the actual piece, which offers some good examples itself:
"To paraphrase Orwell, the English of the world wide web – loose, informal, and distressingly dyspeptic – is not really the kind people want to read in a book, a magazine, or even a newspaper. But there's an assumption that that, because it's part of the all-conquering internet, we cannot do a thing about it."
What?!
And we're asked to swallow "paradigm shift", presumably because use of the phrase "tectonic shift" is now a sackable offence at all self-respecting newspapers (should they exist).
A real paradigm shift seems near complete with the high probability of the existence of the "Higgs Boson" (whatever the fuck that is) empirically established at CERN. Well I don't know what it is but it supports the notion that a "Higgs Field" exists, lending us all gravity until the whole show thermodynamically unwinds for good and thus excluding and falsifying (Popper, not Kuhn) a load of other wild explanations for why fruit falls off trees.
"Big technological changes" are what happened with advent of the worldwide web and the printing press. The www is a cultural byproduct of CERN (and tb-l) and of the actual quest to complete a real paradigm shift. Oh, McCrum.
Most people wrote badly before the www and most people write badly on it. Mystery solved.
I could go on, Mr McC but you must have written this on the bog trying to pass some lithified object through a haemorrhoidal thermopylae of resistance, late to meet yr missis and her mum and not looking forward to it anyway and I am busy and unsalaried.
What Orwell was interested in was clarity and honesty. He believed that if the writer could only shape the thought with sufficient clarity the language could be trusted to look after itself. What he objected to was language that is designed to obscure meaning, and thus avoid accountability, as in the pronouncements of many politicians. He didn't object to cliches if they were apt and moved the argument along, but he had no time for the kind of lazy ready-made phrases that are a substitute for original thought.
@Mrdaydream - It has often been said the Orwell would not have been over the moon at the modern utilisation of English, which, at the end of the day, would not necessarily be demonstrably better (all things considered) than it was in his day; in fact, although Churchill might not have referred to it as a terminological inexactitude, in all fairness all right-thinking people would admit it would not necessarily be an untruth to concede that some of us have apparently learned very little since.
@UnevenSurface - You scamp ;-)
@Mrdaydream - He was describing a form of mental cut and paste as an alternative to thinking through the most appropriate way of conveying your meaning. It's the kind of language that breeds, so we end up with words and phrases and wilfully obscure meaning.
If "online English" were limited to the internet (emails and blogs) it wouldn't be a cause for excessive concern.
But it's as infective as the bubonic plague and just as destructive.
Try reading university students' essays of late, only ten years ago they would have been failed in secondary school.
@melchisedek - The Mail has been running this scare story since mobile phones were invented and I'm yet to see any proof of it. It's like EU Regulations about bananas, or banning Christmas.
Naaaaaaaaaaaaaah. Barking up the wrong tree, I do believe.
There's absolutely no point in discussing or investigating the state of English on the Internet when the internet itself is so intrinsically without geography or set population.
i.e., the rules of language that Orwell would have valued were tied to England and the United Kingdom and the people that resided there. And that's fine, and had this arcticle been written about the grammar of telegraph operators in the 1920s then maybe it would have been less odd, but come on. Whining about "the violence the internet does to the English language" is like complaining that the characters in Dallas didn't speak with Received Pronunciation.
"Consumption" is an odd word to use in an article about Orwell, surely...?
@Eisenhorn - Actually all Orwell valued was language that did its users' bidding, rather than the other way round. He valued clarity and simplicity, for the simple reason that they ease understanding, whereas their opposites can be used to deliberately confuse. Glimmer has already posted the link, but here it is again. I have lost count of the umber of people I have sent it to over the years, almost all of whom have both valued it and been amazed at how long ago it was written.
@UnevenSurface - Can one count an umber? *slinks sadly away from keyboard*
@Eisenhorn - Nonsense. That's like saying there's no point discussing the weather because the sky acknowledges no borders, favours no people.
The internet is not a living thing, with innate or inviolate rules that govern how people use it. It has characteristics but if we have seen one thing since its inception, it is that humans shape it, not the other way round.
The rules that Orwell put forward were actually few and were definitely not limited or relevant only to his time and his geography. The internet may be global; those who use are not necessarily so. The internet has not yet trampled over local culture, language or sensibilities.
Your RP pronunciation analogy is wrong and is the type of line trotted out by those who confuse fluidity and change with a lack of structure. It is not about correctness: it is about the rigour of thought.
The American poet Charles Bernstein in a 1994 address at the New School for Social Research in New York, titled: I Don't Take Voice Mail: The Object of Art in the Age of Electronic Technology, summed up the direction the then new internet would take when he wrote: 'At every point receivers are also transmitters. It is a medium defined by exchange rather than delivery; the medium is interactive and dialogic rather than unidirectional or monologic.'
The model of public discourse has become inverted. Before only a few voices took part in conversations and debates but now anyone with an internet connection can contribute, however crass, inane, ridiculous or embarrassingly stupid we appear.
Before, as now, a majority of what got written was pure unadulterated guff that did not survive beyond the moment of its publication. How many acres of opinion that turned out wholly inaccurate, wrong and, in some cases, dangerous, was bought and paid for and disseminated to the working class masses as though it were declaimed (to paraphrase Sean O'Casey) not by men writing on table tops but by gods from their holy altars of inviolate truth?
What's interesting is how the new freedoms of mass speech are being reacted to by the governments and powers that be on a highly selective geo-political basis. When its someone in China, Russia or another country the Americans and British governments don't see eye to eye with, they are lauded as champions of freedom, but when its someone revealing unpleasant truths the West would rather didn't come out, they are persecuted as dangerous enemies of the state and locked shackled in cages without charge for years on end.
We are seeing now in Britain the police chasing people for tweeting jokes, criminalising certain uses of language, launching investigations into throwaway comments and letting the bigger fish, the bankers who ruined the planetary money system, off the hook because there's little political will to take on the global corporatocracy.
I think as you get further and further away from the second world war and its memory is no longer held in the minds of any living person, the drift towards hypocrisy is more and more apparent.
@Amazeballs - 'At every point receivers are also transmitters. It is a medium defined by exchange rather than delivery; the medium is interactive and dialogic rather than unidirectional or monologic.'
Does that not normally apply to everyday human conversations in the majority of cases?
That statement is not necessarily applicable to the internet message, either.
Receivers might not transmit (''respond'') every time, or interact generally.
Similarly, transmitters may choose not to receive or interact generally.
Much messaging comes in the form of advertising, which is not meant for direct response or interaction to the message.
Bernstein was alluding to the monologic nature of a pre-internet press, when what was delivered to us was in the form of a one way transmission there was no way of contesting except by letters to the editor.
@Amazeballs - I was with you until your final sentence which I didn't quite understand.
Do you think that WWII in the UK was a time of probity and honesty in high places?
I'm a bit puzzled as to what "Internet English" or "online English prose" is. Is it the language of Dickens and De Quincey (because it's all online , isn't it?), or of Twilight fanfiction? The Economist or the Daily Mail? The people who comment on Mary Beard's blog in the TLS or those who comment on YouTube videos? The whole range of English, not to mention other languages, is out there.
@frustratedartist - Wouldn't those current forms of online English discussed in the article be limited to what has been written (as original works) since the beginning of online material?
Historical works (and those before the internet era), which can be read and / or downloaded, relate to the times in which they were written - they are not ''Internet English" or "online English prose", surely?
@elevengoalposts - Yes- I think you may have a point- the first paragraph refers to the question of "what's happening to English prose in cyberspace."
I think it's important to remember that a lot of what we read on the Internet is not really 'writing', but 'speech'. That is, many people, especially on on-line forums but also in blogs etc, use the keyboard to express themselves not in written 'prose' but as if they were speaking. And spoken language is very different from written language.
So- what we read on the Interent reflects the full spectrum of spoken and written language, from academic articles and pieces by Will Self and Stephen Fry, to the rapid fire and unproofread comments in countless on-line chatrooms. Whereas in the past 'prose' was writing that made it into print and in almost all cases proof read by the writer and someone at the printer's, now 'prose' is 'what people produce when they sit in front of a keyboard'.
@frustratedartist - I think you're exactly right.
Actually, criticism of change (decay?) of the English language was prevelant well before Orwell. I used to try to explain the concept to my students (degree in translation studies).
An interesting book on the subject is Language Change - progress or decay?
by Jean Aitchison, CUP 2001. For those who don't want to read, even the title is food for thought.
reply to @melchisedek: "Try reading university students' essays of late, only ten years ago they would have been failed in secondary school."
I don't think I would have got much past the 11 plus with some of the writing I see on the web - and I am talking about well-known newspapers, academic papers and various other publications.
As someone said on the radio the other day, 'it used to be said that if you sat a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters, sooner or later they would write the works of Shakespeare - now, thanks to the Internet, we know that this is simply not true!'
@katherineinitaly - ''prevelant'' (sic)?
I think you mean ''prevalent''.
@katherineinitaly -
It does say "sooner or later", so be patient -- but don't hold your breath.Language is normative; it has – some will say – no choice.
So, I've just got up and reaading this article I'm wondering if I should go back to school. I read 15th, 18th and some 9th centuary English. This article is as difficult as Anglo Saxon to get through.
It's normative as everyone talks, being a language it has no choice; The people, who use it, do.
@noughter - Given the difficulty I have in understanding what you are saying, perhaps you ''should go back to school''.
Or are you simply being ''ironic'', as is often claimed in comments pages?
@noughter - I also struggled with that sentence. I think it is best understood if you read it in conjunction with the preceding sentence:
I decipher this to mean the following:
1) language is "normative", that is, it "pertains to or uses a norm or standard" (Wiktionary and other sources);
2) English prose (this is the unclear bit) has no choice but to apply the "grammatical violations and banality" of current usage.
I'd suggest that the word "normative" is slightly ambiguous here (in the context of a debate about whether or not we can police language effectively), since it also carries a connotation of "imposing or judging in accordance with a standard" i.e. tending towards being prescriptive.
In the context of an article about Orwell's famous essay, and bearing in mind Orwell's famous "clarity" of prose style, some may find the author's ambiguity mildly ironic.
A good indication of how the internet and digital culture is affecting the language is the current state of undergrad English.
I'm currently marking a load of dissertations and some classic symptoms include:
- inability to use paragraphs correctly
- rudimentary punctuation
- inability to sustain a story or argument over pages (or paragraphs)
- inability to differentiate formal and informal tone
Ultimately, the major influence on current students is screen-based rather than page-based. They have the ideas, but lack the literacy to express them.
@nietzsche39 - It's very easy to blame the students and television and those evil computers for that, but consider it another way.
The UK's education system is pretty well crippled and continuing to be demolished bit by bit.
As a result children are getting substandard education and being unable to express themselves lucidly.
I recommend looking up Evgeny Morazov's excellent critiques of Silicon Valley's propensity for 'newspeak':
The Meme Hustler
Well worth the read.
@NotWithoutMyMonkey - Ah yes, nice one: I read that a few weeks back and immediately thought of the Orwell essay under discussion here.
@HudsonP - Thanks! If Orwell were alive today, I'm sure he'd be deeply troubled by the intentionally obfuscating and opaque language coming out of Silicon Valley - stripping away the intrinsic meaning of certain words (such as open) and recasting them as servants for very particular and often troubling agendas.
@NotWithoutMyMonkey - Absolutely! It's far more worrisome than the usual curmudgeons' suspects of text speak and attention spans withered by itchy mouse fingers.
I'm interested in how this language and the aspirations it frames are expressed through sci fi, in particular. If I had time for a PhD, that would be it!
the English of the world wide web...is not really the kind people want to read in a book, a magazine, or even a newspaper. But there's an assumption that that, because it's part of the all-conquering internet we cannot do a thing about it.
Nor apparently can we do a thing about mistakes in prose in a well-financed journalistic operation
As a computer programmer, I find that the irony of the criticism of internet English is that computer languages benefit very much from standardisation, and this "clique of techno-entrepreneurs" quoted in prior comments spends much of its time seeking and founding bodies to do just this.
It helps ensure that the programs we write work well and reliably, in the same way that policing (and even improvement) of the English language makes for better self-expression.
@Choco -
Not necessarily. Which is what computer programmers tend to struggle with :)
What on earth is teh writing trying to point out exactluy?
@commy - Who's Teh?
@RajPDX - Teh is the word "the" with a capitalized T and a reversed he -> eh. I don't know why but when I type this is generally what becomes to my "the"
@commy - Sorry. I was just being silly. If it's any consolation I often tell people in emails that I've been very "busty" when in fact I mean "busy". For some reason they never challenge the assertion though. No idea why.
One marker of declining standards of English on the internet is newspapers' apparent failure to sub-edit their webpages. E.g. articles which have bloopers like 'Orwells's' in their standfirst.
@dogfondler - I think that's got less to do with standards of English and more to do with fewer people trying to do more work. It's particularly unsurprising on a loss-making website.
@dogfondler -
Er.. this is the Guardian. That's not a blooper - its a "feature".
It's not known as The Grauniad for nothing.
Orwell was concerned with clear thinking - which is hard without the clear use of language.
I would have thought his main targets today would have been governments and corporations. They are very often guilty of obfuscation through their use of jargon and doublespeak.
The internet encompasses a great deal more than that.
However it does tend to reinforce bad English purely through the weight of bad writing to be found on it. That has to be a worry.
@Itpossible - Well, you take Orwell's simplistic prescriptions and see how far you get in your analysis of capitalist firm or modern bureaucracy.
There's a reason Marx & Weber wrote the way they did.
@barutanseijin -
You are mistaking clarity for naivety.
Simple is not the same as simplistic.
Orwell was concerned about the political misuse of language. While he certainly appreciated clear prose for aesthetic reasons, I'm not sure one can reasonably extend his critique to bloggers about their cats, travels, Star Trek or whatever.
The medium changes the way prose works, and we've had to allow for the way that people use the web and think up ways for dealing links and signposts and various other specific issues that this connectivity raises. I don't think, however, that the arrival of the internet changes the game: it's just a new medium for obfustication and weasle words.
The main "culprit" seems to be those who use the so-called texting language as an everyday means of communication. It is irritating and the users don't always seem to understand when and where this is appropriate. Use it with friends; fine. Use it in a job application or email to staff; not so good.
Yet this is nothing new. In the early years of the twentieth century there was a fad for writing in telegram language. It went away eventually.
Oh dear.
If Robert McCrum, Cambridge educated, one time literary editor and associate editor of the Observer, editor-in-chief of the publishers Faber & Faber, co-author of The Story of English and other publications, thinks it is OK to use orienting in a UK newspaper, then indeed there is no hope for the English language.
@ID9819963 - Can you explain why?
I cannot see an issue with it; it is a word in the English language.
Readers may be interested to know that one of the current controlled assessments on the GCSE Eng Lang syllabus is the so called 'spoken language' unit, in which student analyse and illustrate changes in language with particular reference to the influences of texting and web/net terminology. I sounds ghastly but in fact can be quite interesting if done in reasonable depth.
I don't see your problem here. 'Orient' as a verb dates back to middle English and its usage here seems correct to me. (If you're suggesting he should be using 'orientating', that's a mid-19th century variant, but no more correct.)
God help the French then
too many sub-clauses (in this polemic) I feel. Not an example to be held up by the Plain English Society
You haven't actually described what "internet english" is, never mind what is wrong with it. Is it just english that is written by someone on the internet?
The internet has enabled multitudes who were assumed illiterate to express their thoughts in text. The results are as unlovely as their speech. Why does this matter? Anybody who receives a communication which is ambiguous,couched in unknown slang or unfamiliar abbreviations can ask for clarity. In an academic or business environment the penalties for slipshod communication are normally (and should be) draconian. The education industry needs to enable its clientele to detect the context and use an appropriate level of clarity. This will be an ongoing process and I suspect that a lot of dross will shake out of the system in due course (language always cleans itself given time if allowed to do so)
Within its natural environment the new language is a positive development: empowering. people who had little power before. The fact that I personally detest it is an irrelevance.
Orwell's concern was effective communication and clear thinking. I suspect neither factor is very important to many champions of the new language, but I see no evidence that anything much has changed,
However the increased lifespan and audience size of new media offers scope for user skills to develop in ways that the casual conversations it augments never did. Provided that assistance to develop literary skills is available in an easily accessible non-patronising context, I am optimistic for the future of our language.
Which is a very long way of stating my opinion that this article is journalism for its own sake - just a trivial text message in another context.
What's really wrong with modern English, internet, email, texting or otherwise? In reality, nothing.
English is a dynamic language and as such has changed dramatically over the centuries, as indeed it should to reflect the needs of the age.
Not everyone in Orwell's time wrote perfect prose, very few probably, and only among the better educated. It was and is beautiful to read but hard to write.
The world of language, any language, can't stand still just to keep the pedants satisfied. Ask the French!
Get over it!.
Man said:
By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.