Calling All Verbivores
by Harld Fox

We have only recently come through a grueling political campaign season. No matter whether you are happy or unhappy with the outcomes, I think we can agree that the campaigns we experienced have thoroughly discredited one proverbial saying. Reading of the money spent on the presidential campaign and record-setting expenditures on many campaigns for lesser office must surely make us doubt the validity of “Talk is cheap.” My first proposal for election reform is to cut the time for the presidential campaign in half. Of course, we know that one is going nowhere

However, the amount of money spent on getting the word out is not the only issue raised by the 2004 political campaigns. For verbivores, like you and me, an equally important concern is the effect of political discourse on the English language. I am sure partisans of either side can point to favorite examples of how their opponents debased the language. To catalog those is not my intent right now. Rather, I wish to raise the issue and point to a classic attempt to address it.

George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” is that classic, and I recommend it to you as a refreshing goad to reflection and evaluation. It is easy to find the essay on the Internet, for example at http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html. This URL is not a recommendation, it is merely the first of more than I cared to count that Google supplied in response to my search for (George Orwell + politics + language). The essay was published in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1946) and republished by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (1974).

Orwell does take a whack at politicians and political discourse:

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 squirting out ink. … 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.

(Note: I give no page numbers for the quotations because of the numerous possible formats in which you may find the essay.)

But that is not all he undertakes in the essay. He is most concerned with the relationship between language and thought.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. … [T]the English language … becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
  Orwell proposes six rules for writing:
  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never us(e) a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

    (Note: I have supplied an “e” in #2 to correct a typo that this example of the essay shares with at least two others available on the Internet.)

He also claims some worthwhile reasons for following the rules.

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.

I commend “Politics and the English Language” to you, both as a blast of fresh air after the political campaigns of 2004 and as an astringent call to self-examination of your own writing. Of course, we all recognize that critical analysis of political discourse is appropriate after the elections as well as before and during the same.

In the preceding number of this column, I called attention to “words that spell different words in reverse.” Such words are called “semordnilaps” by Willard R. Espy, The Game of Words, Wings Books, 1971, 1972, p. 185. I asked you to supply examples beyond “devil,” which reversed becomes “lived.” Other examples Espy gives are “repaid,” “stressed,” “rewarder,” “straw,” “maps,” “strap,” “reknits,” “deliver,” “bard,” and “doom.” It is easier to find short examples, and I came up with these, as well, “now,” “mad,” “rat,” “per,” “mid,” “draw,” “trow,” “dear,” “deer,” “trot,” and “reread.”

For a new puzzler I turn again to NPR’s Puzzlemaster, Will Shortz. He calls this puzzle “All but Q.”

Take the 25 letters of the alphabet other than Q and arrange them to spell five common, uncapitalized words. They can be any length. What are they? Hint: The initial letters of the five words are C, F, G, P, and V.

(Note: Use no letter more than once.)

Until next time, send me your solutions (or suggestions or complaints or stumpers) at hfox@juno.com or 2005 Burroughs Drive, Dayton, Ohio 45406.