Saturday, September 30, 2006
i know this is going to be...long and painful. but it's an interesting read and possibly one of the best things i've read for a long time. enjoy, hopefully?
george orwell's politics and the english language
Index > Library > Essays > Politics > English > E-text
George Orwell
Politics and the English Language
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a ba way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Ou civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in th general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimenta archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath thi lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which w shape for our own purposes
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad — I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:
1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.
Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia)
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)
4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. 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 or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.
DYING METAPHORS. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.
OPERATORS OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.
PRETENTIOUS DICTION. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i. e., e. g. and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers(1). The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
MEANINGLESS WORDS. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning(2). Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip — alien for akin — making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another — but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — 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 favourable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. 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. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: ‘[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence(3), to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.
1946
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1) An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-awayfrom the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific. [back]
2) Example: ‘Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative ginting at a cruel, an inexorably selene timelessness... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation’. (Poetry Quarterly.) [back]
3) One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field. [back]
THE END
____BD____
George Orwell: ‘Politics and the English Language’
First published: Horizon. — GB, London. — April 1946.
Reprinted:
— ‘Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays’. — 1950.
— ‘The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage’ — 1956.
— ‘Collected Essays’. — 1961.
— ‘Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays’. — 1965.
— ‘The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell’. — 1968.
____
Machine-readable version: O. Dag
Thursday, September 28, 2006
okay i must apologize for the previous post, i think i had too much to drink the night i typed that...
Sunday, September 24, 2006
love is a paltry emotion that compromises the entire premise of rationality.
is that the beauty of it?
or is it the opposite?
humanity will be the death of us all
Monday, September 18, 2006
caleb yap, being the usual gung-ho person who hates inertia, has asked me to post something on the blog. hence, the following, which i cross-post here from my own blog for no apparent reason other than that he asked me to put something here. so here goes nothing. hopefully, nobody will find the mad (and very, very, lengthy) musings of my own eccentric self offensive.
long live the last colourless 2ah.
*****
it's been twenty days since i began my frantic paddling into the north ocean where academic odysseys are made, and perhaps it would be innocuous enough at this juncture to decide that i have easily slid back into those same well-worn grooves and patterns of everyday life that i carved out before leaving at the advent of summer. but with just what amount of iron-cast certainty could i make such a proclamation with? is it even possible to contemplate the odd plausibility of my stasis as an entity with schiznoprenic personalities unique to two continents? and what about evolution of personality?
to be sure, i tell myself, i am not entirely the same girl who left vancouver four months ago. arrival in the land of eternal rain has of yet failed to instigate my reversal to the prickly jaded chrysalis of the previous term who hemorrhaged and hiccupped up copious amounts of angst. i like to think that the girth of my waist has shrunk due to the unique combination of Singapore food and sweltering tropical weather. j-- insists that i have somehow managed to sculpt my arms into even more monstrous limbs worthy of display on a renaissance statue - the exact complimentary nature of this comment is dubious. standoffish behaviour from others no longer makes my fists itch, and i actually do more than diffidently hibernate in my room all day. i have even managed to make contact with a canoeing coach who is willing to take me in for winter k1 training (all the way in burnaby, no less). i cooked pan-fried lemon sole fillet the other day. i spend my evenings alternately at the gym, on the road where i huff and puff along in a pathetic imitation of jogging, or standing on the balcony watching the sun set over the ocean strait between vancouver and victoria. i dislike the appellation of 'the balanced lifestyle', and i will continue to eschew it here. what i can hazard to say is that all in all, life is looking up, thanks be to God's grace.
no indeed. i have moved on from where i was then, and at the risk of sounding self-indulgent, i much prefer the current configuration of lifestyle - which isn't to say that i wouldn't rather be back in singapore hanging out with people i love and coaching the team. that magical alchemy of smooth hulls slicing through water and sapphire-gold friendship has done its healing well, washing the clinging darkness of neurosis from my soul. i can only pray that it will continue to work such rejuvenation in the years to come.
consequently, to speak of healing would be to touch upon the oft bandied theme subtly intertwined within the sojourn of the overseas student, namely that of cultural allegiance. how frequently it has come up during the past few weeks in the course of friendly interrogations: so why did you come here? do you like it here? will you stay here after you graduate? for the sake of my own rapid-fire-thought-sorting-process, i reiterate my stance. because i was pushed into it by a curious amalgamation of kin pressure and the logic of my own conniving mind. yes, i like vancouver in the same way i like to put my brain through academic torture in my beloved literature classes (that is, with a great deal of quasi-philosophical-expanding-inner-horizon weight-lifting and with much appreciation of beauty), and i like vancouver as one likes warm kaya toast in the afternoon (that is, lovely until i realise that indulging in the seventh slice is going to make me fat). and no, i do not think i will stay after i graduate.
my motive for the final modicum might just be the most controversial of all. after all, nearly everyone i have spoken to on the subject seems to agree. singaporeans only know how to complain, and then not lift a finger to enact change. we're a cynical people, a blase people, people who spend too much time punching money clocks and frantically beavering away at erecting ivory towers of learning that isolate nobody but ourselves. satirically speaking, we're more like the Hands that dickens mentions in his book, quite literally frying away in the oil of the equator, wasting away in the mechanical humdrum of working life in order to chase precious dollars, descending evermore into melancholy and madness with the tick of the money clock hanging in the exam halls, and all for what - more (white?) elephants? only that we're inherently selfish and self-centred, so we don't even have redemptive qualities of innocence. not even the dignity of a pseudo-uncle-tom passing.
and it's so different here, we chorus, bobbing heads in a concerto of affirmation (does the image of bobbing heads call to mind the little plastic cat with the freaky eyes and the faux ingot in restaurants which waves in fortune and good business with every swish of its capricious paw?). they say thank you to bus drivers here, and people give up their seats without being told. ask someone how they're doing and the answer is an inevitable resounding 'great!' or 'cool!' - it's simply not normal to toss out a casual 'all right' or 'stress until can die la'. speak up in class, even if it sounds stupid. we'll listen, and we'll help you with that. want something done? then ask and go for it, or you'll never know. everything's expensive, but pay is high and there's the welfare state in place. how could you possibly be angry when there's so much more to life than work? politicians are fun to poke at, and we're pretty accommodating people, eh? our national animal is furry, cute, has front teeth a dentist would love. vancouver's beautiful, canada's the first nation of hockey, and we're the best part of north america (certainly not a little red pimple). we. are. canadian! *cue to chug down copious amounts of beer* unemployment, drug culture, irresponsible white brashness, and considerable egress of arty-fartiness aside, it certainly echoes back shades of the elusive good life that we all claim to seek. almost as though the onset of glacial temperatures suspends everything in a perpetual state of freshness and dappled sunlight; the colours are brighter, the air positively tingles with pine crispness (doesn't the bewitching aroma of marijuana smell a lot better than say, car exhaust fumes and smog at rush hour?), and everything is just so pretty (or am i just too caught up with wiping my brow and basking in the torrid weather of home to notice the charm behind the facade of the big industrial city?). everyone seems a whole lot happier too. now why wouldn't i want to stay here and leave the nanny-state behind?
simple. because one of creeds i believe firmly in is congruency of faith and action. i too, in true red-and-white-astra-luna-flag fashion, grouse luxuriant on the predicaments of life at home. but it is really sufficient to simply grumble without the catalyst of hope for a better world? i wish to come home after i am done with university, and it isn't all about the dearth of good prata and a welcoming atmosphere to flaunt singlish in. neither is it about negligent apathy to the seeming interminable weariness and cynicism of day-to-day existence at home, nor to the pink elephant of the widening gap between the have and have-nots. i do not close my eyes to the gathering gloom that i know to be extant, and for this reason, i want to come home to change whatever falls within the circumference of the world i revolve around. there has to be more we can do than empty chatter, there has to be. and there are steps being taken in the right direction, says maudie atkinson. baby steps, but movement nonetheless. and if it really is true that we are on the verge of exponential transformation for the people, then i would willingly remain in the very thick of it as opposed to watching from the sidelines. the only way to lose as i see it, would be to stay where i am right now in canada and be "safe", thus succumbing to the very same cloyed and dismal ennui that we accuse those 'at home' of saturating themselves in.
ironic indeed, that it is only in canada that i am able to galvanise myself thus into expectant envisioning for the future. and while the more sardonic part of my brain points out that this sounds an awful lot like the idealist's version of the cave allegory (or even a warped version of a certain ex-prime-minister's speech on the "quitters" and the "stayers"), it is of no matter. i do like to think that someday i could return home to a place where kindness isn't viewed with suspicion and where people smile at each other instead of staring blankly ahead; where people don't dig themselves deeper into their graves over money and bleed themselves dry for want of a nail; where creativity and selflessness would be a breath of fresh air amid stifling economical bustle; where the strong would help the weak and where children could learn what really mattered in an atmosphere unclouded by the demons of failure and competitive rat races. people would listen to their inner blue penguins intently, the system wouldn't be a stranglehold, and there would always be time to take the phone off the hook to disappear for a while. and democracy wouldn't be an empty word, we would all know that sometimes the greatest way to love anything would be to first let it go, and genuine searches for authenticity and clarity in a world where moral ambiguity reigns supreme would coincide with an unwavering faith in a God who first gave His life for ours...
what i say, is what i affirm myself to believe in, and the subtle insinuations of a potentially repressive regime will not take that privilege of dreaming from me.
"No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row - is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced."
~heart of darkness, joseph conrad~
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
when our parents tell us to stop using vulgarities, what exactly are they trying to tell us? think for a minute, friends, and i know this is hard for us lucky boys who have been wearing green for the past eternity, and consider this: so-called 'bad' words are 'bad' not because of how they sound, but because of the inherent meaning that has been embedded within the word. when we say shit, we don't really mean shit, we mean, 'oh i am so angry i just want to manifest my anger somehow oh look i conveniently have a word that correctly depicts my mood let's use it!' we elect to associate anger and resentment and all sorts of negative feelings with these words, and over time people have decided to shoot the messenger, so to speak, and directly accuse the words themselves of being 'obscene, rude, etc'. it is the intent, and the leviathan will of the masses that shape our aversion. im sure everyone is familiar with the origins of the f-word, aka the greeting of choice for a certain uniformed organization - warrants for legalized copulation in verylongagoicantrememberwhichtimeperiod england that read 'Fornication Under Consent of the King'. am i right actually? i may be wrong. hm. moving on!
by definition, it could be debated that thre are no vulgarities; or rather, any word can be a vulgarity. if i started using the word 'eskimo' in a very derogatory way, like, 'oh bloody eskimo' or '[with malice] eskimo! [/exeunt/ [/end of scene2]', does that mean the eskimo has now become a taboo word? or would it be widely accepted? will the collective lexicon of the vox populi be altered in this way? or will it stubbornly choose to remain mired in its much established motley crue of 'bitch, bastard' and the like?
this leads to another question, which juliet so succinctly resolved, or seemed to resolve : 'a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.' this applies to people who use like, 'fudge', 'shite', 'darn' et al. in the false belief that they are not being vulgar by shying away from conventional and strongly coarse words. the truth is, as long as the INTENT is there, you are already guilty. example : when person 1 is angry, he lets loose a massively stentorian 'OH BLOODY HELL'. on the other hand, when person 2 is angry, he unleashes a diapason of 'OH BLEEDIN' HECK!' which one is being 'more vulgar'? is there even a point of comparison? do we even need to compare? both individuals are obviously peeved at something, just that they use different words to channel their frustrations into. and words, remember, are simply catalysts, artificial constructs [haha that is such an overused phrase] for the rational germination/realization of abstract thought.
(some content omitted because author's train of thought was hijacked and blown up)
so where does all this leave us then? does this mean that no one is actually being vulgar? far from it - it means everyone is capable of being rude and naughty. refraining from using conventional swear words will not absolve you from the fact that you are channeling your anger into a word or phrase for cathartic release. i would even go so far as to say that the in that instance where you use a phrase, say, 'pumpkin risotto', to express your general disgruntled state of being, then you have transmuted it into your very own personal vulgarity, shunning the more promiscuously employed members of the compendium of foul language. you cant escape friend!
i cant think of a nice way to end this entry...
oh btw great writing sulynn :)
