In 1946 George Orwell warned that vagueness and convolution were destroying the English language. Today, writing and speech are plagued by very different problems.
Grateful for this thoughtful essay, Luke. Reading the diaries of Victor Klemperer, I remember that the German-Jewish philologist, who was well-attuned to Nazi propaganda, repeatedly noted the impact of hyperbolic US advertising language on the German media in the 1930s. The exaggerations, short-hand expressions, exclamation-point-ridden prose and simplistic forms of expression became more commonplace as the war continued, and the Wehrmacht faltered. Klemperer’s book Lingua Tertii Imperii (LTI) makes a more extended argument about the same topic. Geremie
I’ve noticed a lot of these peculiarities myself. The primacy of certainty and authorial confidence is interesting in a time of collapsing institutional faith. It feels at times like a defense mechanism. In my personal experience, things have become so strange that I can’t be sure whether or not I’m dreaming, or if any of this is real at all. And yet sometimes I’ll catch myself speaking with confidence about a thing I don’t completely understand.
I think you’re right about the inversion. One wrinkle I’d add, from inside government and from the writing desk, is that this “hyper-directness” is not neutral. It’s a classed and institutional achievement. If you’re paid to manage risk, language becomes smooth, declarative, and bloodless by design. Plain English now often functions as a form of disciplined evasion.
On the creative side, this kills the middle ground where thinking actually happens. Writers are pushed toward courtroom hedging or algorithmic absolutism. The “kind of, sort of” tic can be cowardice, sure. It’s also often self-defence in a culture that punishes uncertainty as moral failure.
What worries me most isn’t bad prose. It’s the loss of proportion. Deliberative democracy needs gradients, trade-offs, and hesitations. When everything must be definitive, politics becomes content, content becomes management, and management becomes anti-politics with better branding.
The task now isn’t just to defend ambiguity, but to make it legible again. To show scale. To say who bears the risk. To admit what we don’t know. That’s not evasiveness. It’s the opposite.
This reminds me of a funny conversation I had with a college student earlier this week. He told me that he was talking to a Ukrainian classmate of his who was very anti communist and wanted to know what you would say to defend Socialism to them and I told him that “You’re probably not going to convince them of anything after a conversation, but if you want to have that conversation just try to tell them what socialism means to you, it’s not going to be a perfect answer but you’ll learn from that conversation and will be better at making the case over time.” And then another guy chimed in with his very specific debate points about Russian and Ukrainian history in order to own the Ukrainian with facts and logic.
I had the more wishy washy answer and the other guy basically seemed right on the history to my knowledge, and I don’t really begrudge him for answering that the way he did, nonetheless I think the wish washy answer was the right one here.
Grateful for this thoughtful essay, Luke. Reading the diaries of Victor Klemperer, I remember that the German-Jewish philologist, who was well-attuned to Nazi propaganda, repeatedly noted the impact of hyperbolic US advertising language on the German media in the 1930s. The exaggerations, short-hand expressions, exclamation-point-ridden prose and simplistic forms of expression became more commonplace as the war continued, and the Wehrmacht faltered. Klemperer’s book Lingua Tertii Imperii (LTI) makes a more extended argument about the same topic. Geremie
I’ve noticed a lot of these peculiarities myself. The primacy of certainty and authorial confidence is interesting in a time of collapsing institutional faith. It feels at times like a defense mechanism. In my personal experience, things have become so strange that I can’t be sure whether or not I’m dreaming, or if any of this is real at all. And yet sometimes I’ll catch myself speaking with confidence about a thing I don’t completely understand.
I think you’re right about the inversion. One wrinkle I’d add, from inside government and from the writing desk, is that this “hyper-directness” is not neutral. It’s a classed and institutional achievement. If you’re paid to manage risk, language becomes smooth, declarative, and bloodless by design. Plain English now often functions as a form of disciplined evasion.
On the creative side, this kills the middle ground where thinking actually happens. Writers are pushed toward courtroom hedging or algorithmic absolutism. The “kind of, sort of” tic can be cowardice, sure. It’s also often self-defence in a culture that punishes uncertainty as moral failure.
What worries me most isn’t bad prose. It’s the loss of proportion. Deliberative democracy needs gradients, trade-offs, and hesitations. When everything must be definitive, politics becomes content, content becomes management, and management becomes anti-politics with better branding.
The task now isn’t just to defend ambiguity, but to make it legible again. To show scale. To say who bears the risk. To admit what we don’t know. That’s not evasiveness. It’s the opposite.
This reminds me of a funny conversation I had with a college student earlier this week. He told me that he was talking to a Ukrainian classmate of his who was very anti communist and wanted to know what you would say to defend Socialism to them and I told him that “You’re probably not going to convince them of anything after a conversation, but if you want to have that conversation just try to tell them what socialism means to you, it’s not going to be a perfect answer but you’ll learn from that conversation and will be better at making the case over time.” And then another guy chimed in with his very specific debate points about Russian and Ukrainian history in order to own the Ukrainian with facts and logic.
I had the more wishy washy answer and the other guy basically seemed right on the history to my knowledge, and I don’t really begrudge him for answering that the way he did, nonetheless I think the wish washy answer was the right one here.
Just wait till AI slop makes it even more tiresome to read and listen to passages