"Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell

Prior to reading this post, you should check out George Orwell’s short essay, “Politics and the English Language.” You can find it at https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm.

Years ago, I worked as something called a “management consultant.”  During the 9 months that I lasted in this job, I learned phrases such as “transparent process”, “pick the low-hanging fruit”, “perfuming the pig,” “cherry-picking”, “table stakes”, “magic quadrant”, and “motherhood and apple pie.”  I didn’t know what many of these phrases meant, but I was told that they were “industry terms” and that our clients expected to hear them.  I lived in constant fear that someone would actually ask me during a presentation what these phrases meant. No one did.  Our clients never questioned what we said. The cloudy, meaningless words we used gave us authenticity and, I suspect, intimidated our audience.

Every time I wrote or spoke any of these phrases, I thought of George Orwell’s brilliant essay, “Politics and the English Language” which he wrote in 1946. This essay is a lesson on how to improve one’s writing as well as an exploration of the relationship between politics and language. As Orwell writes:  “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.”  Much of what Orwell wrote in this essay remains applicable to our lives today, particularly in the area of management consulting.

Management consultants, for those of you who have been spared contact with these people, are brought into organizations (banks, universities, not-for-profits, synagogues, hospitals) to tell staff how to fix their company’s problems and how to do their jobs better. Management consultants often spend a few hours reading background material on these organizations and then conduct interviews with various “stakeholders” (a term that would have made Orwell ill) to arrive at a plan to make the organization more efficient or, as I used to say, “to improve their efficiencies.” That management consultants often have no experience working in these organizations and are advising people who have decades of experience doesn’t faze anyone. I remember once listening to a management consultant who had experience in the music industry advise people at a large clothing distributor.

Management consulting defies logic, and yet management consultant firms continue to exist. Why? Management consultants have learned how to mask their ignorance by inventing a way of communicating to make them sound authoritative and intimidating. By doing so, they break many of Orwell’s rules for good writing.

One of the phrases that I often heard, wrote, and used was: “Motherhood and Apple Pie.” In his analysis of several poorly written quotes, Orwell observes that they all suffer from lack of precision. So does this phrase.  Does it mean:

a.      Something so obvious to the reader, we don’t need to discuss it further?

b.      Something so important to the reader, we need to really discuss it?

To this day, I still don’t know the answer. And yet I used this phrase as though I did knowing that Orwell would have accused me of all of the following: “The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything at all.”

Orwell highlights several writing mistakes that he finds particularly disturbing in political writing: dying metaphors, operators or verbal false limbs, and pretentious diction. Management consultant communications are filled with these errors such as dying metaphors like “stakeholder”, roadmap” and “table stakes,” verbs that end in “ize” (“utilize” or “operationalize” instead of “use”), and sentences that end with anticlimactic endings such as “going forward.” Pretentious language is everywhere. “Website Experience Analytics” instead of “Is your website effective?”

Management consultants also prefer the passive voice— common also to political writing--which does not name a subject of an action. Consultants, journalists, politicians, do this to be purposely vague. “The IT system, that cost the public millions of tax dollars, failed.” When the passive voice is used, the guilty are not identified, not reprimanded, and therefore free to make the same mistakes or commit the same crimes.

People who work in consulting companies are also notorious for taking the words of others, tweaking them to suit their needs, and then putting their own names on it. This kind of plagiarism or what Orwell describes as: “[the] gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug” is perfectly acceptable in the consulting world. Ironically, if you do it as a business student, you are disciplined by your institution.

Orwell also mentions that the “whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.” Can you imagine what he would have said about the tendency of consultant language with its preference for phrases such as: “perfuming the pig”, “low-hanging fruit”, and “stickiness.”  Or how about this sentence that I wrote for a hospital strategic plan (having no background in either hospital administration or strategic planning): “This medical institution needs to identify a method to create a culture of measurement and accountability driven to continuously measure the quality and cost effectiveness of its market leading services currently under deployment.” For this nonsense, my client paid my employer $1000 a day. Orwell would have fired me on the spot. 

 We, the audience, have not only encouraged this kind of language, we now expect it. When people speak clearly and simply, we think they are stupid. We want to hear long words and foreign terms because we believe that the people uttering these sounds are smarter than us and so whatever they say—regardless if they have the experience or knowledge to say it—is right. We become silent when we hear people speak like this and when we do so, we give up our responsibility to think for ourselves. Many of us want to be fooled into thinking that others know better than we do. And management consultants are only too happy to play along. Even though he is writing in a different context, Orwell describes this insanity perfectly:

When one watches some tired hack (management consultant) on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder (cherry-picking, going forward, create efficiencies) -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity…

And favourable to creating conformity in board rooms: the silent, acquiescent nodding of heads.

In this essay, Orwell writes example after example of what happens when language is vague and people don’t question it. This is one of the more harrowing examples:

People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

This kind of language, Orwell concludes, is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.”

Management consulting language is designed to hide the massive holes in consultants’ knowledge of their clients, to make their consulting firms looks authoritative and respectable as they destroy people’s lives by recommending their firing or calling them redundant, and to intimidate into silence the few people still capable of asking me, the unqualified consultant: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Why do we allow this to happen? I think it is because my clients wanted me to fool them. They wanted to believe that I had the answers even though having seen my resume they knew that was impossible.

In general, people like when people in authority tell them what to do. Perhaps we are lazy, or busy, or afraid to make decisions. What this essay tells us is that how we write today—with a lack of clarity, passively, big words--allows people in authority to perform this task easily. In both politics and business, the consequences have been disastrous.

This essay should be the first piece of required reading for every college or university student not only because it is brilliant, but because it is a warning as prevalent in 1946 as it is today.