Language Poverty
The cold weather is coming back. That means it's time to beat the "fuel poverty" drum. According to the mainstream press, a person lives in fuel poverty if he must spend 10 per cent of his annual income to keep his home acceptably warm.
According to this article, the Queen of England is close to fuel poverty, but then the article morphs into a discussion about how the Queen is trying to reduce costs by turning off lights.
I'm not sure how lights fit into the fuel poverty equation, but I'm pretty confident that, when the Queen of England falls within any definition of poverty, then the definition of poverty has gotten surrealistically, ridiculously, absurdly, Orwellianistically expansive.
On Orwell
I surfed to find the correct Orwell adverb for that last blurb. I couldn't find one, so I made one up.
But in my surfing, I ran across Orwell's excellent "Politics and the English Language." About ten years ago, I was at a Touchstone conference in Chicago and speaking with David Mills. David, for those who don't know him, is possibly the finest Christian writer alive, a man of ideas who could probably crank out a meaningful book every year, but instead concentrates so intently on his craft that he produces slowly. That, anyway, is my impression of him after working with him on a handful of articles.
While talking with him, he made a reference to that Orwell essay. I was forced to admit that I hadn't read it and, worse, had never heard of it (but I got the "George" part right and didn't refer to Orwell as "Henry" or "Greg"). I still remember the look on David's face. It was somewhere between "My gosh, I'm talking with a neanderthal" and "My gosh, I'm talking with a child molester."
Needless to say, I immediately bought a collection of Orwell essays that contained the essay and read it carefully. If you aspire to write goodly, I highly recommend the essay. If you don't want to read the whole thing, here is, in my opinion, the crux of the essay:
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
That's good stuff.
And it leads us back to "fuel poverty." The press is full of bad writers, rushed journalists who don't know this essay by Orwell. They use ready-made phrases like "fuel poverty," instead of fresh phrases. They don't hesitate to refer to "fuel poverty" as a situation in which a homeowner spends more than 10% of income on fuel, hoping (if only in a vague, inchoate sense) to spark political intervention, not realizing (or, more probably, not caring) that such a phrases obscure more than enlighten.
But then we hear that the Queen of England is about ready to slip under the fuel poverty line. We then realize that the phrase is meaningless. Such satori is a good thing. The problem is, we don't see the bigger problem that Orwell wrote about: the mainstream's prose, more often than not, is bankrupt. It's all catch-phrases, few new images. All regurgitation, little original thought.
The implications are huge, and, I suspect, driving much of our public discourse. Sloppy thinking invades our minds because it drinks sloppy prose. The public discourse is then geared to the sloppy thinking, which needs catch-phrases to acquire what little understanding it can handle. The bin of slop gets deeper and deeper.
I have no suggestions for how we get out of this muck, especially since, if you showed this blog post to people, nine out of ten of them would nod in sage agreement, intuitively excepting themselves.
Even if they had thought Orwell's name was "Greg."
