In 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian state created Newspeak, a strictly utilitarian language with a continuously shrinking vocabulary and simplistic syntax. To avoid ambiguity and complexity, Newspeak kills words, limiting the possibilities of thought. Clear victims of this effort are beauty and originality.
Orwell himself employed simple but often startlingly vivid language. In his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” he says that obscure language “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details.” Nature is a fertile source for metaphor.
In Orwell’s Roses, arguing the case for Orwell-as-gardener, Rebecca Solnit catalogues a lovely selection of such images.
The kind of metaphoric, evocative, image-rich speech that Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Newspeak is trying to root out is grounded in the natural, rural, and agrarian world; the language of plowing ahead, having a hard row to hoe, reaping what you sow, making a beeline, going out on a limb, not seeing the forest for the trees, rooting out itself, and all the rest. Orwell in going rural was, among other things, returning to the source of metaphor, aphorism, and simile.
How often are we hoping, outside of the garden, to do some weeding and trimming? We plant ideas, we fertilize and water them. As ye sow, so shall ye reap, after all. Add to my list, and Solnit’s. I love how she got me thinking of gardening language and its fruitfulness.
Thanks for this. I am grateful for the thinking that both of these posts stimulated.