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
Don't know how I missed this comment at the time, but I've incidentally been reading excerpts from Klemperer's diaries as well and that's a good parallel to draw I think.
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.
The argument captures a real shift in how political communication operates: incentives now favour immediacy, certainty, and rhetorical closure over careful qualification. That produces a kind of false clarity - statements appear decisive, but often strip out the conditions and tensions that give them meaning in the first place.
Orwell saw related dynamics earlier in Politics and the English Language and more broadly in 1984, where degraded language doesn’t just obscure thought but actively constrains it. The concern is not only about bad phrasing, but about how habitual simplification makes certain kinds of reasoning harder to sustain at all.
The deeper issue at hand is that nuance is not stylistic decoration; it is what allows political reasoning to hold multiple pressures at once. When discourse penalises that capacity, it changes what kinds of arguments can survive in public.
Calls for “clarity” can therefore become ambiguous in their own right: sometimes they mean precision, but often they drift toward simplification. The difference matters, as simplification can eliminate the very contradictions that analysis is meant to work through.
Where, then, do you think the line is between making ideas accessible and flattening them beyond recognition? Thanks
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
Don't know how I missed this comment at the time, but I've incidentally been reading excerpts from Klemperer's diaries as well and that's a good parallel to draw I think.
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.
Worth noting that Orwell used both "a kind of" and "a sort of" in his novels and essays, including twice in Politics and the English Language.
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.
The argument captures a real shift in how political communication operates: incentives now favour immediacy, certainty, and rhetorical closure over careful qualification. That produces a kind of false clarity - statements appear decisive, but often strip out the conditions and tensions that give them meaning in the first place.
Orwell saw related dynamics earlier in Politics and the English Language and more broadly in 1984, where degraded language doesn’t just obscure thought but actively constrains it. The concern is not only about bad phrasing, but about how habitual simplification makes certain kinds of reasoning harder to sustain at all.
The deeper issue at hand is that nuance is not stylistic decoration; it is what allows political reasoning to hold multiple pressures at once. When discourse penalises that capacity, it changes what kinds of arguments can survive in public.
Calls for “clarity” can therefore become ambiguous in their own right: sometimes they mean precision, but often they drift toward simplification. The difference matters, as simplification can eliminate the very contradictions that analysis is meant to work through.
Where, then, do you think the line is between making ideas accessible and flattening them beyond recognition? Thanks
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