Don't be beguiled by Orwell: using plain and clear language is

not always a moral virtue

Owell season has led me back to his famous essay Politics and the English
Language, first published in 1946. It is written with enviable clarity. But is it true?
Orwell argues that the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a
gap between ones real and ones declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to
long words.
I suspect the opposite is now true. When politicians or corporate front men have to
bridge a gap between what they are saying and what they know to be true, their
preferred technique is to convey authenticity by speaking with misleading simplicity.
The ubiquitous injunction Lets be clear, followed by a list of five bogus bulletpoints, is a much more common refuge than the Latinate diction and Byzantine
sentence structure that Orwell deplored.
We live in a self-consciously plain-spoken political era. But Orwells advice,
ironically, has not elevated the substance of debate; it has merely helped the political
class to avoid the subject more skilfully. The art of spin is not (quite) supplanting
truth with lies. It aspires to replace awkward complexities with catchy simplicity.
Successful spin does not leave the effect of skilful persuasiveness; it creates the
impression of unavoidable common sense. Hence the artifice becomes invisible just
as a truly charming person is considered nice rather than charming.
There is a new puritanism about the way we use words, as though someone with a
broad vocabulary or the ability to sustain a complex sentence is innately
untrustworthy. Out with mandarin obfuscation and donnish paradoxes, in with lists
and bullet points. But one method of avoiding awkward truths has been replaced by
another. The political class now speaks as it dresses: in matt navy suits and opennecked white shirts. Elaborate adjectives have suffered the same fate as flowery ties.
But this is not moral progress, it is just fashion.
The same techniques have infiltrated the literary world. Popular non-fiction has
evolved using quotidian prose style to gloss over logical lacunae. The whole
confessional genre relies on this technique. Gladwellian, properly defined, is the
technique of using apparently natural, authentic and conversational style to lull
readers into misplaced trust: disarmed, we miss the sleights of hand in the content.
As a professional cricketer, I learned the hard way that when a team-mate said, Look
mate, Ill be straight with you because nobody else will, he was about to be neither
straight nor my mate. The most consistently dishonest player I encountered spent
much of his career beginning conversations with engaging declarations of plainspoken honesty. His confessional, transparent manner helped him get away with
years of subtle back-stabbing. When another team-mate thanked him for sitting him
down and saying, Look mate, Ill be straight with you because nobody else will, I
felt a horror of recognition: another one duped.
If Id studied Shakespeare more closely, I wouldnt have been so easily fooled.
Othellos tormentor, Iago, is seen as an honest and blunt man (though he does
confess to the audience that I am not what I am). His public image derives from his
affectation, his sharpness of speech. Iago is believed because he seems to talk in
simple truths.

In King Lear, Cornwall and Kent argue about the correlation between directness and
authenticity. Cornwall (wrong in this instance but right in general) argues that
straightforwardness often masks the most serious frauds: These kind of knaves I
know, which in this plainness harbour more craft and corrupter end than twenty
silly-ducking observants that stretch their duties nicely.
Using plain and clear language is not a moral virtue, as Orwell hoped. Things arent
that simple. In fact, giving the impression of clarity and straightforwardness is often a
strategic game. The way we speak and the way we write are both forms of dress. We
can, linguistically, dress ourselves up any way we like. We can affect plainness and
directness just as much as we can affect sophistication and complexity. We can try to
mislead or to impress, in either mode. Or we can use either register honestly.
Philip Collins, the speechwriter and columnist, has written a book about how to
persuade an audience. The Art of Speeches and Presentations is a superb primer, full of
erudition and practical wisdom. Collins holds up Orwells essay on politics and
language as a model of sound advice. But deeper, more surprising truths contra
Orwell emerge from his arguments. He explains how using simple, everyday speech
is effective but he also quotes Thomas Macaulays argument that the object of
oratory is not truth, but persuasion. Following this logic, there is, unavoidably, a
distinction between ends and means. Whatever the moral merits of your argument, it
is always best to present it in the clearest, most memorable style. Disarming linguistic
simplicity is a technique that can be learned. But how you deploy that technical
mastery the authenticity of the argument is quite a different matter.
There is a further irony about Politics and the English Language. Orwell argues that
the sins of obfuscation and euphemism followed inevitably from the brutalities of his
political era. In the age of the atom bomb and the Gulag, politicians reached for
words that hid unpalatable truths. By contrast, our era of vague political muddle and
unclear dividing lines has inspired a snappy, gritty style of political language: the nononsense, evidence-backed, bullet-pointed road to nowhere.
Orwells essay is rhetorically persuasive. And yet it makes little attempt to prove its
central thesis. The reader, having nodded at a series of attractive and catchy stylistic
observations, is tempted to accept the central thesis. In fact, Orwells combination of
masterly style and under-examined logic is the perfect refutation of his own
argument.