George Orwell: Politics and the English Language | Hacker News Reader

George Orwell: Politics and the English Language

orwell.ru

110 pointsnight-rider46 comments

The thing about language and culture is that they adapt. This essay of of Orwell has been pretty popular for a while and people know what language to avoid when employing Orwellian tactics.

A modern example of Orwellian language can be found in the advertiser based businesses helmed by many of the biggest tech companies. If you are using straightforward language, the products built by these extremely profitable companies have one singular purpose - to collect as much data as possible from the user, while keeping the user in the dark about it, and then use the data to manipulate user behavior so that they buy the stuff advertisers sell them.

But with the way these companies talk about their products, you'd be hard pressed to figure out how the products make money. They'd make grandiose claims about how they are changing the world for the better, how they are connecting people, how they are producing value and so on... all the while deceiving the users.

My rule of thumb is to avoid using a software product/service if the business model is not self-evident or vague on first impression.

Of course I have other considerations but I save myself a lot of effort in selecting software to use this way. If a product/service passes this rule of thumb then I dig deeper to see if it good to use (doesn't violate freedom or privacy, isn't manipulative etc.)

Hmm.. what's the business model of HN?

Seems to me its to promote Y combinator and the startups going through their program to the tech crowd, and to also provide a recruitment pool for those startups.

So startup promotion and talent outreach I would say, both which require an audience (HN in this case).

Users get information and discussion forum, Y combinator gets an audience/talent pool. Sounds like a fair deal to me, and from what I can tell no malpractice.

> manipulate user behavior so that they buy the stuff advertisers sell them

google.com started as an ad-supported web search engine and evolved into a web-supported ad search engine.

Google does have some non-advertising businesses however.

I actually wanted to buy a Google One plan, but when I read their terms of service[1], it said that my data still is subjected to their privacy policy[2]. Which means Google can still sell my data to advertisers, even if I were to pay for the service.

1. https://one.google.com/terms-of-service 2. https://policies.google.com/privacy#whycollect

This is why I don't like the old saying "if you're not paying, you're not the customer, you're the product". Paying often makes you even more of a product because now you've proven that you have money to spend.

My favorite is "your privacy is important to us" as the first sentence of a huge ToS that absolutely shreds your privacy. Of course privacy is important to them, it's how they make all their damn money. Don't worry, they won't expose your private data to the world. Just mine it and sell it to their buddies. As explained in as vague and general terms as legally defensible, as written by a whole team of lawyers.

that's why my favorite phrasing is "we value your privacy".

Orwell was a far better essayist than a novelist, so it's a shame they don't get read as much. I highly recommend the one where he analyses some children's stories: https://orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys.

The political implications he teased out are very interesting.

I think of this more as Hemingway-esque rather than Orwell-esque, but whenever I look at anything I wrote, I almost always take words out.

> 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(

Exactly. MBA-speak 101 == "Use the longer words. It sounds more management-y. We don't 'use' -- we 'utilize.' "

And MBA 201 leverage and capitalize on to enable and unlock.

>"Exactly. MBA-speak 101 == "Use the longer words. It sounds more management-y. We don't 'use' -- we 'utilize.' ""

We do not read books, we do not eat food, we do not watch TV - we consume

Reminds me of an interview I watched with an author where she used the word "bifurcated" instead of split, which made me chuckle, because she said "the book is actually bifurcated into two halves". Bifurcated already implies 2 parts ("bi"), so it seemed she was just using that word to sound smart. Who actually says bifurcated during a conversation?

Using uncommon and complicated-sounding words actually works, but only on less educated people who don't know these words and don't know the context in which they are used.

Now I have to check if I've ever used "bifurcated."

Guilty pleasure: I sorta like that word /s

The thing is there's absolutely nothing wrong with any of those words.

Unless you're using them just to sound smart or official, when there's a simpler word that means the same thing.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

This is harder to read on mobile than OP’s version

I wanted to read, but not on a .ru site.

edit: I just tried it on mobile Safari and it was a pleasant read. :b

What's wrong with the linked site? It looks good on my phone. (not tested with a desktop)

Eh, it gets processed by reader mode correctly so it’s not terrible.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity (and really thin fonts).

Ironically they are not even pingable from my VPN.

These techniques are still used today by propaganda outlets. It is sad that Orwell reads not as fiction, but as reality.

And the best one i read a couple of days ago: CIA sponsored the movie 1984. The same CIA which employs methods like the ones in the book and in the film.

Also the latter part of of the sentence "Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." was removed from his introduction to Animal Farm in the US edition.

https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2016/02/16/pr-orwel...

And CIA changed the ending in the filmization of Animal Farm.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/18/books/how-the-cia-played-...

Orwell was a thought leader in the word space.

But seriously, I work as an editor and I am reminded of this essay frequently.

> But seriously

You had me going for moment with your first sentence. Also, it seems that the role of "editor" is becoming a lost art. As the saying goes, why do I need an editor if eye halve the spelling check her that came with my pea sea?

From the link: 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 judgements

Reminds me of 'safe and effective', lol

Another version of this is the ever-present headlines along the lines of, "Scientists urge [x] to [y].' It's written as if scientists are some homogeneous entity, and gives the air of "science", to a view that invariably happens to be whatever the author of the article happens to think. Just check to see if anybody with passable bonafides to be called a scientist has ever advocated for your view, which they have - so long as it's even remotely reasonable, and you're set to write your "Scientists urge..." article.

in many non-English articles, it's very often "American Scientists" instead of just "scientists", for the same reasons you stated.

At this point, "American scientists discovered that ..." is a meme in some countries.

If you’re afraid of opening links from .ru, perhaps you’ll be happier with .us ;-)

https://deathray.us/ebooks/orwell_politics.html

> If you’re afraid of opening links from .ru

Why would you be afraid of that?

.ru is double-plus-ungood.

I have so little respect for journalists. Even the highbrow news sources people love to share links to here are incredibly weasely. They all sound like Orwell's strawmen.

If you ever want to verify this for yourself, watch a video capture of a big news story. I did it few times and I was shocked at the tenuous grip on reality the corresponding articles had.

PS: where can us non-journalist peasants get access to data free from the priestly interpretations of jouranlists? EG the recent epstein list, or the leaked no fly list from a few years back. Searching this is always just pages of pages of journospam.

This may stem from the owners of media having so little respect for journalism?

I suppose I might consider Assange a true independent journalist.

> get access to data free from the priestly interpretations

I believe nowhere. I almost never see news media hotlink the source when we're talking about online events. In other cases that's copywriting or regurgitating news agencies' feeds... which you don't have access to, though they could be clusterized based on the ripple effect they cause (used by many outlets).

As for "talking to witnesses" there currently isn't a p2p social network for news. Where one could talk to any local on the planet about an event. There's a disconnect between those who produce news for a living and the witnesses. The latter have no interest in posting or talking about it online. Sometimes it is disincentivized (punishment and persecution like whistleblowing[1]).

[1] "The psychology of whistleblowing": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X1... / https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.07.005

I uovote because of the flagging

At first it seems slightly dissonant that this is on a .ru domain, given what Orwell had to say about Russia, the Russian revolution and Communism. But, on reflection, maybe that is all the more reason why a .ru domain is appropriate.

I love the clarity of Orwell's writing. To me, Orwell and Kafka (I've only read English translations) are paragons of clear and beautiful prose.

Firstly, it's there because the copyright on his works has long expired in Russia. Secondly, there happened to be an individual who was passionate about a topic. Notice how it's "web 1.0". I don't know if people create such single-use libraries/sites nowadays.

> given what Orwell had to say about Russia ... who has never visited Russia and his best effort was to extrapolate his experiences in Spain.

I think he had plenty of experience of Russian communism during the Spanish civil war, even if he never visited Russia.

USA has always been at war with post-soviet Russia.

(1946) or (2019)

Some previous discussion a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34277254

And prior:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34279202

Reply on news.ycombinator.com