⌾Curio #26 - George Orwell, The Guillotine & KAASI
Welcome back to another edition of Curio. If the news cycle is making you feel slightly frazzled, then this newsletter hopes to be like drinking a warm cup of ginger and turmeric tea in a cozy room filled with the fragrance of freshly picked jasmine.
Mary Cassatt - The Cup of Tea (1881)
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Oli
George Orwell on the English Language
“Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way”
- Politics and the English Language (1946)
In 2008, The Times ranked George Orwell the second greatest British writer since 1945
Biography
Eric Blair (whose pen name was George Orwell) was born in India in 1903, where his father was a civil servant. As a boy, he attended high school at the famous Eton College before deciding to forego university and instead moved to Burma, where from 1922 to 1927 he was a member of the Indian Imperial Police. He then spent a couple of years living in Paris and then returned to England where he worked at various stages as a tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant. In 1936, the idealistic Orwell volunteered to fight for the Republicans against Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. He was eventually shot in the throat and had to spend many months recovering, including half a year in Morocco. During the Second World War, Orwell worked for the BBC and became literary editor of Tribune as well as a regular contributor of literary and political commentary in various newspapers and magazines. It was in the years just following the war that he published his two most famous works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four, which led to worldwide acclaim. He died far too young — at age forty-six — from a burst artery in his lungs in 1950.
Politics and the English Language
On top of producing two of the most popular novels of the twentieth century, Orwell was also a prolific and brilliant essayist. One particularly influential piece is Politics and the English Language. It details Orwell’s complaints about how English is used and abused as well as his prescriptions for how it can be improved. Despite being written in 1946, the essay is still as relevant today as it was when he wrote it — probably more so. Anyone who uses the written word for a living should read the essay at least once a year. Some key excerpts are below.
The Problem
“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.”
Bad Habits of Writers
Worn-Out Metaphors
“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: toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, Achilles’ heel, swan song
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”
“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”
Examples: render inoperative, play a leading role in, militate against, be subjected to, give rise to
Pretentious Diction
These “are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements”
Examples: categorical, constitute, exhibit, phenomenon, utilize
“Foreign words and expressions are used to give an air of culture and elegance”
Examples: ancien regime, deus ex machina, status quo
“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”
Examples: expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous
Meaningless Words
“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”
“Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality”
Orwell as a boy at Eton
Further Problems
“The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
“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.”
Orwell in Burma in the 1920s, sporting an unfortunate ‘toothbrush’ mustache
Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing
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
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If you’re interested, you can read the full essay here
The Last Public Execution By Guillotine
When I think of the pornographic level of graphic violence associated with a public decapitation by guillotine, I tend to be reminded of the French Revolution. That’s why I was shocked when I stumbled across this grisly photo of France’s last public execution by guillotine… from 1939!
France’s last public execution by guillotine, June 17, 1939
1939 is not that long ago. To put it in context, it was the year the movie The Wizard of Oz was released, LaGuardia Airport opened in New York and a pair of electrical engineers, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, founded Hewlett Packard.
The unfortunate man with his head on the chopping block in this shot is Eugène Weidmann, who was found guilty of murdering six people in Paris two years earlier. On the morning of June 17, 1939, he was taken out in front of the Prison Saint-Pierre in Paris, where a rowdy crowd (including a young Christopher Lee) watched with anticipation.
Once France’s chief executioner Jules-Henri Desfourneaux let the blade fall, the mob went wild, with newspaper Paris-Soir denouncing their behavior as “disgusting” and “unruly”, with “jostling, clamoring, whistling”. Some even used handkerchiefs to dab up Weidmann’s blood as a souvenir. The “hysterical behavior” by attendees was considered so scandalous that French President Albert Lebrun decided to ban all future public executions.
Although no longer on display in the public square, the French kept up the gruesome practice until 1977 when Hamida Djandoubi became the last person executed by guillotine by any government in the world.
KAASI
Matthew Martin (KAASI) is a London-based producer who released Long Time Coming in 2015. With echoes of Flight Facilities, this track features the gorgeous and hypnotic vocals of Zoe Wrenn and is the type of mellow, loungey electronic sound that I love listening to when driving.
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“Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life”
- Karl Ove Knausgård
Curio is an email newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. It is put together by Oli Duchesne