Orwell Again and Again
Orwell's famous essay on Politics and the English Language has been the springboard for countless opinion columns ever since it was written (how many, I wonder?) Here's the latest one, by Jonah Goldberg, and it's a hoot. He's got some great lines, as always, and any excuse to quote the winners of Dennis Dutton's bad writing contest is all right by me.
You don't have to look very far to find examples of unclear language reflecting (and causing) unclear thinking: they are everywhere, particularly in academic writing, perhaps because contemporary academic jargon was patterned after the ideological propaganda of Orwell's time. Goldberg makes a good point about the difference between what the jargon concealed then, as opposed to what it tends to conceal now:
In Orwell's day, the fog of jargon was a smoke screen to conceal real horrors; today the jargon is just so much smoke, to hide the fact that there's no fire. Read pretty much anything by Cornel West and you'll find all sorts of euphemisms brimming with racial or anti-capitalist sound and fury, signifying nothing...Today's intellectual elite — the stars of Harvard and Berkeley — speak in such gibberish precisely because if they spoke plainly, clearing the smoke from their ideas, we'd learn that their views cover the spectrum from boringly unoriginal to sand-poundingly stupid. So-called "new theories" and "path-breaking approaches" are most often little more than novel, but increasingly ugly, arrangements of the same old deck chairs on the Lido deck of the Titanic.
This well-known sentence, from Orwell's essay, remains one of the most provocative and unsettling statements ever written on politics:
Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.