In the comments of my review of Orwell’s essays, Ephant alerts me to Geoffrey K. Pullum’s attacks on one of those essays over at The Language Log. The essay in question: Politics and the English Language.
First issue: clichés. The main thing I can say here is Robert Fisk is no Orwell, and just because he rails against words and phrases that don’t deserve it doesn’t mean Orwell himself was wrong. I don’t see what’s wrong, for example, with the word “veterans.” On the other hand, Fisk is clearly right about “extremist.” The word has two problems: the question of “extreme compared to what,” and the derogatory way the word is always used tend to get people nodding along with the idea that whatever is moderate must be good–and since the point of comparison is arbitrary, it’s a way of getting your position arbitrarily labeled as the good one. I’m split on other words: “militant” has a perfectly good Merriam-Webster meaning of “engaged in warfare or combat” (with “outside a traditional military” usually implied), though it’s also used as a derogatory term for anyone who strongly supports what you happen to strongly oppose. That second use is just as dumb as any use for “extremist.”
Clichés also come up in a post on plagiarism, which contains this sentence: “We mouth clichés, we borrow snowclones, we cite famous phrases and sayings intending them to be recognized.” Does that sound like a defense of cliché to you? Without context, I would think it a self-parodying lament. The substance of the post is odd, because it mixes Cliché, allusion, and parallel thinking on one side, and opposes all that to plagiarism, missing the distinctions between the first three. In parallel thinking, you didn’t hear the phrase anywhere else, you just thought along the same lines as someone else. In allusion, there’s a definite text you’re referring to. In cliché the phrase has just been heard enough for everyone to feel okay with it, even if they don’t know what it means. Allusions are a bit showy, but when used by people who know them for people who know them, they’re remarkably compact. A quick phrase from Hume can call up a struggle with some of the most perplexing issues philosophers have ever faced, a pair of phrases from Hobbes and Rousseau give you early attempts to map out human nature.
The other issue is the passive, where Pullum doesn’t have much of a point, except that Orwell broke his own rules (which Orwell admitted) and that sometimes you can’t use the passive (which Orwell admitted). There’s no actual dispute with Orwell. It’s not that you can always use the active, but that when you can and don’t you either make the sentence unnecessarily long, or you leave out useful information at no advantage in length. Constant omission of who’s doing what is frustrating: I remember reading a scientific paper on a controversial subject, where data accuracy could be a worry, and wondering “who am I supposed to trust to have done this right?” In the case of scientific papers, the effect of the passive seems to be giving the impression all experiments are the product of an infallible Science, rather than mortals, and to make it hard for anyone who wonders about that to pry.
I think Pullum’s point was that setting rules about How Writing Should Be Done is rather silly – Orwell broke his own rules! There’s nothing wrong with using cliches if a cliche gets across the meaning that you want to convey – and there’s nothing wrong with inventing unheard-before combinations of words if they create a sentence that creates the meaning that you want. Similarly with the Passive voice – I’m sure you agree that it is often a useful thing, and as we can see Orwell used it himself.
I think what Pullum objects to is the idea that you should work to “avoid cliches/passive voice” rather than to make your writing say what you want it to say.
Which is why I agree with you about your final point about the passive voice which is that it *can* make things unnecessarily difficult to understand. I disagree that this is because the passive voice is inherently unclear. I know that as a geology student I was advised to copy the style and tone of the geology papers I was reading – awful, wordy, passive voiced horrible horrible things. I refused to obey and tried to write my essays in as clear a way as possible which involved using the active voice much of the time. What I am trying to say is that the problem with scientific writing being stupidly confusing in the passive voice is not due to the inferiority of the passive voice but due to the fact that the passive voice has been inflicted upon writing which should be in the active voice!
I think that Pullum is telling us not to make the same mistake in the opposite direction; ruthlessly avoiding perfectly valid ways to write things, just because they are sometimes or often-times mis-used by other people, is rather silly.
Oh, any principle can go bad if applied stupidly–not defending Orwell as interpreted by your middle school English teacher.
Insofar as a cliche is a distinct unit, it’s the same as using any other word, it just happens to be composed of multiple words.