George Orwell "Politics and the English Language

Over many reading years, I have occassionally heard reference of George Orwell's essay written in 1946, Politics and the English Language. It has always seemed an intriguing essay, complimented or mentioned positively by writers whose discernment I respected. But since it was always incidental to what I was doing at the moment, I have never tracked it down and read it.

Until today.

And now having read it I understand why it is held in high regard. Take a look at it through the link above. A few quotes give a feel for his pugnancious advocacy to not write lazily but do so with attention and concentration. His message is pretty similar to that of E.B. White in his Elements of Style or of Robert Graves in his The Reader Over Your Shoulder which I have always particularly enjoyed.

"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers."

I especially like his translation exercise.

"I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

And then later in the essay.

"A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. "

Not much nostalgia for the old days

Sultan Mehmet II

From Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler's The Best, Worst & Most Unusual.

Most Unusual Archer: Mohamet II was an avid archer who insisted on practicing his art upon moving targets. Citizens straying too near the palace were frequently found studded with arrows, and it did not take pedestrians too long to learn to stay well out of the range of their mad sultan. Understandably, Mohamet was disappointed when he discovered that his people were avoiding him. Left with no alternative, he ordered the palace guard to round up a regular supply of Instanbullians for hazardous assignment as royal prey.

At last, the terrified Turks appealed to Sheik Ul-Islam, an influential man of the cloth, who was one of the few who still dared to approach the world's most imprudent archer. After patient and tactful negotiations, the sheik persuaded Mohamet to limit his practice to eight targets a day - restricting himself to prisoners of war.

Now there's a thank-you

USS Skate, 1943. US Navy Photo

Also from Time-Life's War Under the Pacific. This time it is relating an incident following one of the first deployment's of submarines as life-guards. The USS Skate has been assigned life-guard duty, seeking and rescuing pilots downed in the waters around Wake Island. Though not as glamorous as their preferred hunter-killer missions, life-guard duty was very dangerous for submarines but a tremendous booster of morale among pilots tasked with flying hundreds of miles across open ocean in enemy territory. Skate has made several rescues in this, its first operation.

From the carrier Lexington, some of whose fliers were among those saved, came a grateful signal: "Anything on the Lexington is yours for the asking. If it's too big to carry away we will cut it up into small parts."

Sometimes it comes down to luck

Reading Time-Life's War Under the Pacific, I came across a couple of items.

The first relates an incident in the first twelve months of the war in the Pacific, a period when US submarines were badly handicapped by highly defective torpedoes. But as related, sometimes plain luck is enough to sink an enemy ship.

The (USS) Tambor moving along briskly on the surface at night, fell in with four cruisers and two destroyers, presumably American. By first light, she saw that the warships were Japanese - and they saw her. In the ensuing confusion, two of the cruisers collided. Both were damaged in the crash, and one sank that afternoon without being hit by a single torpedo from the Tambor.

One can only imagine the feeling on the submarine's bridge as the early dawn suddenly reveals their predicament. "Uh-oh" hardly covers it.

Keeping Perspective

The Gleaners (1857) by Jean-Francois Millet


Sometimes the biggest news is the least reported. Peter Magnusson points out in his blog, that based on a recent report from the UN's International Labor Organization "For the first time in 10,000 years, farming is not the dominating industry".

Read the whole thing

Home again, home again, jiggety jog

On this day, September 6, in 1522 a lone surviving ship, the Victoria, of Magellan's original fleet of five ships, returned to Spain, being the first ship and crew to circumnavigate the globe and forever shrinking our world, and setting boundaries on fears and illusions but opening up a world of exploration and discovery.

Of the 270 members of the expedition that had set out three years earlier, only 18 returned. Magellan, having been killed in the Philippines, was not among them. Juan Sebastian Elcano captained the Victoria on its return. His reward? The King of Spain dispatched him with another fleet to repeat the journey three years later. He did not survive the second voyage.


Indpendent Readers

Around the World in a Hundred Years by Jean Fritz and illustrated by Anthony Bacon

Young Adult

Over the Edge of the World by Laurence Bergreen

Plus ça change . . .

I cannot claim any real knowledge of Henry James (1843 - 1916) not being much of a fiction reader and even less of an enthusiast for books about social situations and manners. I was, however, dipping into the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910) and came across this description of his characters:

Rarely are they at close quarters with any ugly practical task. They are subtle and complex with the subtlety and the complexity that come from conscious preoccupation with themselves. They are specialists in conduct and past masters in casuistry, and are full of variations and shadows of turning.

It makes you wonder at the circumstances that in a century, liberated them from the pages of Henry James' novels and allowed them to occupy the airwaves and so many seats of power today.