Politics and the English Language政治与英语.docx

Politics and the English Language政治与英语In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense 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. Defenseless 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.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. 在我们这个时代，政治演说和写作在很大程度上是为无法辩护之事进行辩护的。诸如英国在印度的统治的延续，俄国人的清除与放逐以及在日本投放原子弹，这些的确可以辩护，但是仅仅只是说明那些太残忍以至于大部分人无法面对的事情，以及那些与政党公开宣称的目的不相符的事情。因此，大部分政治语言不得不由委婉语、乞词以及绝对含糊的暧昧词组成。毫无防备的村庄遭受空中轰炸,居民们被逐出农村，小牛群遭遇机关枪扫射，棚屋因燃烧弹起火，这就是所谓的和平。数百万名农民的农场被洗劫一空，他们囊中空空，踏上长途跋涉的征程，这就是所谓的人口迁移或者边界重定。人们监禁多年却未接受审讯，或是遭受背后冷枪，又或是因坏血病被送去北极林木营等死，这就是所谓的消除不确定因素。如果一个人想要表达事情而又不唤起人们心中的记忆，这样措辞是需要的。这种夸张的风格本身就是委婉说法的一种。大量的拉丁文字如雪绒般飘落于事实上，模糊了它们的轮廓，并将所有的细节都覆盖。清清楚楚的语言的大敌是伪善。只要事实与宣称的目的之间存在差距，一个人就会本能地转而使用长词和大量方言，如同乌贼喷出墨汁。在我们这个时代，没有一件事情能“置身政治之外”。所有的问题都是政治问题,而政治本身就是大量的谎言、借口、荒谬、憎恨、和精神分裂症。大环境不好，语言必会受到影响。