Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. It does make me get a clear mental image from the very first word. It leaves little room for roaming and guessing, as it firmly nails elements one by one, and, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I get the full meaning almost immediately.
This sentence is not randomly written; this is crafted with intention. TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand. I seriously like it.
Perhaps, this is more about context -- which style to use in which situation. I'm only guessing here, but, since Orwell is offering an interpretation, he probably chose to be more clinical. He probably had a point to make and didn't want to risk vagueness up-front.
To be gentle, that some here are impressed by Orwell's intentionally bad sentence indicates that they need to improve their reading and writing skills. Using complex words where they don't introduce additional precision or meaning to fake intellectualism is something basic that writing classes warn against.
Orwell's bad sentence uses harder words than it needs to, but it reworks the bible verse into direct claims.
Needing better reading skills to understand the bible verse just shows that it's not a good way to communicate. If an HNer wrote like the bible verse, you'd find them insufferably ostentatious. Just like you wouldn't want Claude to use literary flair when you're asking why your production database stopped working.
If you dumb down Orwell's sentence back to simpler terms, it's a point much better communicated than the bible verse.
Frankly the bickering in this thread is due to the original HN comment choosing a bad comparison because both sentences are poorly communicated for different reasons in this context: you wouldn't want Claude to write either.
I'll point out that the bible verse was a translation for the common folk of their central religious document in an age where Christianity was dominant. Being able to read it smoothly is a very low bar to clear for the educated.
When I read the Orwell's version, I immediately had the same feeling I had when reading mathematical proofs. I hate so much to hunt the preceding text for anaphora resolution... It's just such a bad and pretentious way of writing. It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
It's like having to sit through a party with acclaimed academics: every single one is so full of themselves, they will constantly one-up each other by belittling everyone in their workplace s.a. to make you feel how great of an intellect they possess and how much more they would accomplish, had they not been surrounded by all these bumbling idiots.
I agree that it's not great style for just conveying information clearly and plainly (e.g I'd hate to read documentation written like this) but I'd argue that here, the medium is part of the message.
It's supposed to sound dry and depressing and somewhat sterile.
> It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
I think if someone deliberately obfuscates meaning to sound fancier when the point is to communicate information directly, sure, I'd agree. But writing is often art, and I think demanding effort from the reader is fair in that case. I wouldn't make a blanket generalization like that.
I agree in that I don't know in what context Orwell wrote the quote above. Maybe it made more sense the way it fitted in that context.
Whenever this kind of discussion happens, I recall Andrey Platonov (a Russian writer, who was so weird in his rejection of the "decadent" parts of speech and sentence clauses that he'd never use passive voice or adverbs, would never put two adjectives side by side etc. that even Soviet censorship decided to ban him.) His works were added to the mandatory high-school reading list back around the collapse of the Soviet Union. I studied book publishing in college right around that time and had taken an elective in editing (the process of preparing a manuscript for publication, especially for the more technical fields, like encyclopedias or handbooks). My professor was a huge fan of Platonov, and, probably, forever spoiled for me whatever people enjoy when they read flamboyant or contorted prose like the one quoted above.
One thing that would send my professor into a fit of rage about that quote is that the real subject is people: it's talking about how people incorrectly rationalize the connection between effort and outcome. But, it's written in a way that, formally, the subject is... "the consideration", making it necessary for the reader to work back from the formal towards intended before they can figure out what the author was really trying to say.
I disagree. There is plenty of writing that operates at the same level of abstraction (philosophy, mathematics) without being needlessly convoluted.
Orwell is a master precisely because he understood language deeply enough to be able to produce a monstrosity on both the level of content (undue abstraction) and structure (winding, breathless syntax).
Ah, I just read through it. That’s was a fun read.
> This is a parody, but not a very gross one. …
So, Orwell wrote the second sentence as a parody of the first sentence, using the modern English that he was criticizing in the essay.
> … in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. …
> … The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. …
> … The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first.
He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original. Sure, the parody has narrower meaning, but it is a valid subset of the original meaning, which is still very significant tbh. This justifies the reduction of “race, battle, bread” into “success or failure”, invalidating one of his points.
Also, the parody is not necessarily less concrete. It replaced poetic expressions in the original with words that are bloated, for sure, yet more concrete. It does have awkward expressions, but every word plays a role in the sentence. This basically conflicts with one of his criticisms in the essay — meaningless words.
Funnily enough, his another example — “some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism” — also fails to capture the nature of the modern English. He points out the “euphemism” towards the violence as an issue of style, but, no, that’s the whole purpose of it, and his example really just excel at it. Style-wise, again, the writing is very solid.
All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize. Good examples of “modern English” can be found in the earlier part of the essay, basically written by other people. Those examples do fit into Orwell’s criticisms.
He tried to argue that the second one is worse, but, unfortunately, he successfully simulated one possible interpretation of the original
All in all, Orwell simply failed to properly simulate what he was trying to criticize
If I was going to read "Orwell was wrong about English" anywhere, I guess it was always going to be HN.
The sheer pomposity of your remarks here is the biggest clue that you are not writing them yourself.
No, my view is more like that he was too good at English to write bad English that he was criticizing. The examples he wrote are simply too sharp to fit well into his own criticisms. They are formulated so well that you can just “welp, my intention was different”.
EDIT: This kinda reminds me of the musical theory of harmony. There are strict rules to follow in music composition, but when you go against every single rule in major scale, and keep your work sound nice, you eventually get a minor scale piece that keeps every rule that you tried to break through.
Same here. He probably wrote a disgusting piece in his standards, but kept the writing sane, and eventually it became a proper prose — simply with disgusting intention in his standard.
> we are all way worse at reading compared to the average mid-20th centry reader?
I would say English has changed. Modern English speakers, especially those in academia and technology, prefers explicit styles over poetic and nuanced ones. There are a lot of factors at play (e.g. i18n, the internet, education, literature) but I’m too lazy to cover them here.
> you - and no one else in the hundred years since - found his fatal mistake?
First, the essay is from 1946 — 80 years ago. Second, why not? Often-times, a different perspective is all that takes to discovers something new in the old.
I think you’re trying to make an appeal to authority here — a logical fallacy. You’re basically saying I cannot criticize his essay because Orwell is a great writer.
Also, my point is neither fatal nor about mistake. Orwell’s examples still demonstrate his claims in a relative sense, all within the context of the essay. However, when you pull them out of the context and put them out in the wild, it’s going to be very difficult to say those are bad writings right away, because, compared to other bad writings, those examples are very solid and straightforward.
> This is not even a sentence.
It is informal, sure, but I intentionally made it colloquial with something called bare quotation, a style commonly used in informal conversation. I wanted to avoid being “an overeducated dolt” and send a friendly gesture too, oh, but you chose to put that on a pitchfork. Bravo, clap clap.
> Also, my point is neither fatal nor about mistake[sic]. Orwell’s examples still demonstrate his claims in a relative sense, all within the context of the essay. However, when you pull them out of the context and put them out in the wild, it’s going to be very difficult to say those are bad writings[sic] right away, because, compared to other bad writings[sic], those examples are very solid and straightforward.
You should take this as an opportunity to improve your English and widen your reading, rather than trying to win a silly argument on a forum with 'logical fallacies' and other such humdrum wikiphilosophy. I'm not even sure what you meant to say in this paragraph, it's not at all clear I'm afraid.
Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer or .
But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern. It has no redeeming features, and deliberately so. If you read 1984, you'll see further what he was getting at and rebelling against - a tendency to use words to obscure and twist meaning rather than transmit it.
> widen your reading, rather than trying to win a silly argument on a forum with 'logical fallacies' and other such humdrum wikiphilosophy.
Yeah, sure, the paragraph there is pretty bad, I admit. I was having an technical issue w/ my phone. But, look, did you really read my comment, the whole set of it? It's not even about philosophy. I'm just talking about a little /finding/ that Orwell's examples of bad-English is much better than what you usually find in your daily lives.
I'm not even arguing here, because you people avoid engaging w/ my point itself. It's more like I'm only repeating myself again and again and again. I'm not raising anything new.
> Your perspective on this is entirely wrong, starting with a mistake about the intentions of Orwell and the quality of the text (which is deliberately obtuse and plain awful in so many ways). If you can't easily interpret the biblical text, that's fine, it is quite old, but there is really no excuse for saying that Orwell is a bad writer
First, if you were talking about my first comment, I did mention that "I'm only guessing". I did clarify that I didn't read at that point. Someone replied with a link to the essay, so I read it, and only then I said "I [had] read it".
Second, I never said the original is bad. I only said the parody is pretty good, perhaps because of its brutal explicitness, which the first one lacks comparably.
Also, I've been saying that Orwell is a bad /bad-English/ writer, not a bad writer. His proficiency in English doesn't imply any proficiency in reproducing the bad-English he was criticizing. This part is childish, sure, but it was supposed to be /fun/.
> But Orwell's example here is an example of bad writing, not good, and was produced deliberately as an anti-pattern.
I totally agree here, but ...
> It has no redeeming features
... this is the part I disagree with.
Sure, on the surface, they are chokingly bad. I definitely agree that he removed certain qualities from those examples, and, for demonstration purposes, they serve the purpose.
However, if you offer those examples completely out-of-context, it's going to be difficult to dismiss them simply as bad writings. Their logical flow is very natural, and his word choices are very precise. It is much better /formulated/ than a lot of real-world bad English writings. I definitely sense /professional touches/ from those examples. That's why I said that it would take me hours, if not days, to write such sentences by myself.
Both versions are great: the former is poetic and grand and would fit right in in a fantasy text; the latter is dry and informative and requires much less mental effort to translate and extract meaning from (though still more than "normal" text.
I could imagine a third version that's clearer than the second and still nearly as poetic as the first.
Well, I can tell what sort of angle you most enjoy. Anyways -- I think there is GOOD writing and BAD writing, but only subjectively. So if you enjoy it, power to you. It's certainly not random, but it is the sort of verbosity that turns off 99 percent of the people that would read it given a comparison. I find the former rather eloquent.
Despite its bizarre look, the sentence is evocative and eloquent. It does make me get a clear mental image from the very first word. It leaves little room for roaming and guessing, as it firmly nails elements one by one, and, by the time I reach the end of the sentence, I get the full meaning almost immediately.
This sentence is not randomly written; this is crafted with intention. TBH, it would take me hours, if not days, to write a sentence this much condensed and easy to understand. I seriously like it.
Perhaps, this is more about context -- which style to use in which situation. I'm only guessing here, but, since Orwell is offering an interpretation, he probably chose to be more clinical. He probably had a point to make and didn't want to risk vagueness up-front.