In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay called "Politics and
the English Language," In this essay he makes 6 points
that will help each of us become better writers. They
are:
Most people who bother with the
matter at all would admit that the English language is
in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot
by conscious action do anything about it. Our
civilization is decadent and our language — so the
argument runs — must inevitably share in the general
collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse
of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring
candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.
Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that
language is a natural growth and not an instrument which
we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must
ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not
due simply to the bad influence of this or that
individual writer. But an effect can become a cause,
reinforcing the original cause and producing the same
effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. 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 will come back to
this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning
of what I have said here will have become clearer.
Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English
language as it is now habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because
they are especially bad — I could have quoted far worse
if I had chosen — but because they illustrate various of
the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a
little below the average, but are fairly representative
examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them
when necessary:
1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true
to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a
seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of
an experience ever more bitter in each year, more
alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit
sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski (Essay in
Freedom of Expression)
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes
with a native battery of idioms which prescribes
egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic
put up with for tolerate, or put at a
loss for bewilder.
Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia)
3. On the one side we have the free personality:
by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither
conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are,
are transparent, for they are just what
institutional approval keeps in the forefront of
consciousness; another institutional pattern would
alter their number and intensity; there is little in
them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally
dangerous. But on the other side, the social
bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of
these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition
of love. Is not this the very picture of a small
academic? Where is there a place in this hall of
mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics
(New York)
4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's
clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united
in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at
the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement,
have turned to acts of provocation, to foul
incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells,
to legalize their own destruction of proletarian
organizations, and rouse the agitated
petty-bourgeois to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of
the fight against the revolutionary way out of the
crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old
country, there is one thorny and contentious reform
which must be tackled, and that is the humanization
and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will
bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of
Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for
instance, but the British lion's roar at present is
like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream — as gentle as any sucking dove. A
virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to
be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world
by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly
masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice
of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and
infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly
dropped than the present priggish, inflated,
inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless
bashful mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but,
quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are
common to all of them. The first is staleness of
imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer
either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he
inadvertently says something else, or he is almost
indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or
not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is
the most marked characteristic of modern English prose,
and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon
as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into
the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of
speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and
less of words chosen for the sake of their
meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked
together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
I list below, with notes and examples, various of the
tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction
is habitually dodged.
DYING METAPHORS.
A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a
visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which
is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in
effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can
generally be used without loss of vividness. But in
between these two classes there is a huge dump of
worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power
and are merely used because they save people the trouble
of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are:
Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the
line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder
with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to
the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of
the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of
these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what
is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors
are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not
interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now
current have been twisted out of their original meaning
without those who use them even being aware of the fact.
For example, toe the line is sometimes written as
tow the line. Another example is the hammer
and the anvil, now always used with the implication
that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is
always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other
way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was
saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.
OPERATORS OR
VERBAL FALSE LIMBS. These save the trouble of
picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same
time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give
it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are
render inoperative, militate against, make contact
with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for,
have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make
itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve
the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the
elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single
word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a
verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or
adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as
prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition,
the passive voice is wherever possible used in
preference to the active, and noun constructions are
used instead of gerunds (by examination of
instead of by examining). The range of verbs is
further cut down by means of the -ize and de-
formations, and the banal statements are given an
appearance of profundity by means of the not un-
formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are
replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having
regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the
interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends
of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding
commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left
out of account, a development to be expected in the near
future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a
satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.
PRETENTIOUS
DICTION. Words like phenomenon, element,
individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective,
virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit,
exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to
dress up a simple statement and give an air of
scientific impartiality to biased judgments. Adjectives
like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable,
triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable,
are used to dignify the sordid process of international
politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war
usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic
words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist,
trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot,
clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as
cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis
mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung,
are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except
for the useful abbreviations i. e., e. g. and etc.,
there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign
phrases now current in the English language.
Bad writers, and
especially scientific, political, and sociological
writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that
Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and
unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict,
extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous,
and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their
Anglo-Saxon numbers(1). The jargon
peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman,
cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey,
flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists
largely of words translated from Russian, German, or
French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to
use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and,
where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier
to make up words of this kind (deregionalize,
impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so
forth) than to think up the English words that will
cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an
increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
MEANINGLESS WORDS.
In certain kinds of
writing, particularly in art criticism and literary
criticism, it is normal to come across long passages
which are almost completely lacking in meaning(2).
Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead,
sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art
criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that
they not only do not point to any discoverable object,
but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.
When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr.
X's work is its living quality’, while another writes,
‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is
its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a
simple difference opinion. If words like black
and white were involved, instead of the jargon
words dead and living, he would see at
once that language was being used in an improper way.
Many political words are similarly abused. The word
Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it
signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words
democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic,
justice have each of them several different meanings
which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case
of a word like democracy, not only is there no
agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is
resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt
that when we call a country democratic we are praising
it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime
claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might
have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any
one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a
consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses
them has his own private definition, but allows his
hearer to think he means something quite different.
Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot,
The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The
Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are
almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words
used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less
dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science,
progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and
perversions, let me give another example of the kind of
writing that they lead to. This time it must of its
nature be an imaginary one. 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.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit
(3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the
same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not
made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the
sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but
in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle,
bread — dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or
failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so,
because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing —
no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective
considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever
tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way.
The whole tendency of modern prose is away from
concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little
more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but
only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of
everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of
ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin
roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains
six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and
chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains
not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of
its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version
of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a
doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining
ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate.
This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops
of simplicity will occur here and there in the
worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to
write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes,
we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary
sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst
does not consist in picking out words for the sake of
their meaning and inventing images in order to make the
meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long
strips of words which have already been set in order by
someone else, and making the results presentable by
sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is
that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you
have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an
unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.
If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have
to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to
bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these
phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less
euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry — when you
are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making
a public speech — it is natural to fall into a
pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a
consideration which we should do well to bear in mind
or a conclusion to which all of us would readily
assent will save many a sentence from coming down
with a bump. 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. Look again at the examples I gave at
the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses
five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is
superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and
in addition there is the slip — alien for akin —
making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of
clumsiness which increase the general vagueness.
Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a
battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while
disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with,
is unwilling to look egregious up in the
dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an
uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless:
probably one could work out its intended meaning by
reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In
(4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say,
but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea
leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have
almost parted company. People who write in this manner
usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike
one thing and want to express solidarity with another —
but they are not interested in the detail of what they
are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that
he writes, will ask himself at least four questions,
thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express
it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this
image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will
probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more
shortly? 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. The
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.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing
is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally
be found that the writer is some kind of rebel,
expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’.
Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a
lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be
found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White
papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of
course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike
in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid,
homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired
hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar
phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel,
bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand
shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious
feeling that one is not watching a live human being but
some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes
stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's
spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to
have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether
fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology
has gone some distance toward turning himself into a
machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his
larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if
he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he
is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and
over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is
saying, as one is when one utters the responses in
church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not
indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political
conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely
the defence 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. Defenceless 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. Consider for
instance some comfortable English professor defending
Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I
believe in killing off your opponents when you can get
good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will
say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime
exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may
be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that
a certain curtailment of the right to political
opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of
transitional periods, and that the rigors which the
Russian people have been called upon to undergo have
been amply justified in the sphere of concrete
achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A
mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow,
blurring the outline and covering up all the details.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When
there is a gap between one's real and one's declared
aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words
and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out
ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out
of politics’. All issues are political issues, and
politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly,
hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere
is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find —
this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to
verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages
have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years,
as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also
corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and
imitation even among people who should and do know
better. The debased language that I have been discussing
is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not
unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired,
would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we
should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous
temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow.
Look back through this essay, and for certain you will
find that I have again and again committed the very
faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I
have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in
Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to
write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the
first sentence I see: ‘[The Allies] have an opportunity
not only of achieving a radical transformation of
Germany's social and political structure in such a way
as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself,
but at the same time of laying the foundations of a
co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels
impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has
something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry
horses answering the bugle, group themselves
automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This
invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the
foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can
only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against
them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of
one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is
probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if
they produced an argument at all, that language merely
reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot
influence its development by any direct tinkering with
words and constructions. So far as the general tone or
spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is
not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have
often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process
but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two
recent examples were explore every avenue and
leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the
jeers of a few journalists.
There is a long list of
flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of
if enough people would interest themselves in the job;
and it should also be possible to laugh the not un-
formation out of existence(3), to
reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average
sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed
scientific words, and, in general, to make
pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor
points. The defence of the English language implies more
than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying
what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism,
with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of
speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’
which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it
is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word
or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has
nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are
of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning
clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with
having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other
hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the
attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it
even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to
the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and
shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is
above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word,
and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing
one can do with words is surrender to them. When you
think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and
then, if you want to describe the thing you have been
visualising you probably hunt about until you find the
exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of
something abstract you are more inclined to use words
from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort
to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in
and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or
even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put
off using words as long as possible and get one's
meaning as clear as one can through pictures and
sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply
accept — the phrases that will best cover the
meaning, and then switch round and decide what
impressions one's words are likely to make on another
person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale
or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless
repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one
can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a
phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when
instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover
most cases:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of
speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut
it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the
active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word,
or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday
English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say
anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but
they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has
grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One
could keep all of them and still write bad English, but
one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in
those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of
language, but merely language as an instrument for
expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.
Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that
all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this
as a pretext for advocating a kind of political
quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can
you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such
absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the
present political chaos is connected with the decay of
language, and that one can probably bring about some
improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you
simplify your English, you are freed from the worst
follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the
necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark
its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
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. One cannot change this all in a moment, but
one can at least change one's own habits, and from time
to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send
some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot,
Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test,
veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse —
into the dustbin where it belongs.
1946
_____
1) An
interesting illustration of this is the way in which
the English flower names which were in use till very
recently are being ousted by Greek ones,
snapdragon becoming antirrhinum,
forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It
is hard to see any practical reason for this change
of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive
turning-awayfrom the more homely word and a vague
feeling that the Greek word is scientific.
2)
Example: ‘Comfort's catholicity of perception and
image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the
exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to
evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative
ginting at a cruel, an inexorably selene
timelessness... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at
simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not
so simple, and through this contented sadness runs
more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation’.
(Poetry Quarterly.)
3) One
can cure oneself of the not un- formation by
memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was
chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen
field.
THE END
