Orwell's 1946 Warning on Language and Thought

Opening

“It doesn’t align with public sentiment.”

You’ve probably heard politicians reach for this line before. Doesn’t something about it always feel off? I feel a flicker of discomfort every time I hear it. Whose public, from which era, feeling exactly what sentiment — none of that is ever specified.

Someone had already dissected this exact discomfort back in 1946, with surgical precision. That someone was George Orwell¹​. Yes, the same Orwell known for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four wrote a 24-page essay right after World War II ended, called “Politics and the English Language.”

Today I want to talk about why this essay still holds up 80 years later, and what we should take from it.

What Orwell Saw: Nazis, Soviets, and the British Government

Orwell wrote this essay out of intellectual fury directed at three groups.

Nazi Germany’s propaganda²​, Soviet doublespeak³​, and the British government’s euphemistic manipulation of language. These three camps stood on opposite sides politically, but to Orwell’s eye, they were all doing the same thing: wrapping uncomfortable realities in language so that people couldn’t think clearly about them.

Orwell’s own examples make the sharpness of his point land harder. Official documents of the time described the total aerial destruction of entire villages as “pacification.” Forcibly expelling farmers was called “transfer of population.” Executing political opponents was “elimination of unreliable elements.”

In the face of brutal reality, language had become an anesthetic.

What makes this essay even more uncomfortable is that Orwell’s gaze didn’t stop at the Nazis and the Soviets. He believed the British government — which called itself part of the “free world” — suffered from the same disease. In his view, this wasn’t a matter of ideology. It was a structural instinct of anyone holding power.

Four Diseases of Bad Language

Orwell identified four recurring patterns of bad writing in the English of his day. Even translated into Korean 80 years later, they’re eerily familiar.

First, Dying Metaphors

These are expressions used purely by convention, their original meaning long forgotten. Orwell cited phrases like “Achilles’ heel” and “swan song.” In Korean, four-character idioms like samyeon-choga (“surrounded on all sides”) or pajukjise (“momentum that splits bamboo”) occupy a similar space — their origins forgotten, only a vague sense of “a tough situation” surviving.

The problem is that the moment you reach for these phrases, thinking stops. The expression does the thinking for you.

Second, Operators, or Verbal False Limbs

This is the habit of inflating a simple verb into a bloated noun phrase. Saying “is showing a decreasing trend” instead of simply “decreased.” Orwell saw this as more than a style problem — it’s a way of dodging thought. The more convoluted the phrasing, the harder it becomes to criticize.

Third, Pretentious Diction

This is the pattern of reaching for unnecessarily Latinate or academic-sounding words to appear neutral, or scientific. In Korean, English acronyms and loanwords often play this role — terms like “AX,” “digital transformation,” “resilience.” What exactly is being changed stays empty, while the appearance of sophistication remains.

Fourth, Meaningless Words

This is the type Orwell considered most dangerous. Words like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “patriotism” fall here. The problem isn’t that these words are bad — it’s that they’re so vague anyone can fill them with whatever meaning they like.

There’s a moment where Orwell’s point cuts straight to the bone. Writing in 1946, he said: the moment a country calls itself a “democracy,” the word has come to mean nothing more than “what we approve of.” It’s a phrase engineered to preempt criticism entirely.

Where Wittgenstein and Orwell Meet

The philosopher Wittgenstein⁴​ famously said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Orwell applied this to political language specifically.

As language grows impoverished, the range of what can be thought shrinks with it. The moment you settle for “public sentiment,” even asking what that sentiment concretely is starts to feel out of place. The word absorbs the thought.

Orwell believed this process was often intentional design. The blurrier the language, the harder it becomes to assign responsibility. One of his most famous lines reads roughly like this: the purpose of political language is to make lies sound truthful and murder sound respectable.

Orwell wrote this essay in 1946. And he himself admitted: “this is a problem that can be fixed.” Yet 80 years later, we still haven’t fixed it.

Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing

So what was Orwell’s prescription? At the end of the essay, he lays out six rules for clear writing.

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print
• Never use a long word where a short one will do
• If it’s 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 equivalent
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous That last rule stands out. It shows that Orwell saw language not merely as a matter of efficiency, but of ethics.

Oz’s Lens

Honestly, my first reaction to reading this essay was embarrassment.

As someone who works with AI and data, I churn out phrases like “AX,” “AI transformation,” and “data-driven” every single day — without ever explaining what exactly is supposed to change. By Orwell’s standard, I’m one of the producers of “pretentious diction” myself.

There’s a pattern I’ve seen over and over while building GTM strategies: good strategy comes from good language. A team that says “we’re going to revolutionize the customer experience” and a team that says “we’re going to cut onboarding time from 72 hours to 6 hours” differ from each other starting at the level of execution detail. When language becomes precise, thinking becomes precise. When thinking becomes precise, action becomes precise.

Orwell aimed his critique at political language, but its range is actually much wider — business decks, corporate press releases, AI product descriptions, even newsletters. The illusion that writing obscurely makes you sound smart, the instinct that writing vaguely reduces your accountability — this is the root of the disease Orwell diagnosed.

And in 2025, there’s a new channel through which this disease is spreading faster than ever: AI-generated text. What an LLM⁵​ produces is, statistically speaking, a combination of the phrases people have used most often — a compilation of clichés, essentially. AI-written press releases, AI-drafted strategy documents, AI-polished political speeches. What Orwell called “dying metaphors” and “pretentious diction” can now be mass-produced by automated systems.

Language built to avoid thought has now grown wings, courtesy of generative AI.

Closing

Orwell’s essay boils down to one line: writing clearly isn’t merely a matter of style — it’s about defending your capacity to think.

Take away just three things.

• Check whether the words you use every day carry concrete meaning. “Innovation,” “customer-centric,” “data-driven” — can you actually explain what these mean in practice?
• Vague language isn’t only the result of vague thinking — it can also be the cause of it. When words blur, thought blurs with them.
• Orwell’s principles aren’t just for politicians. Before you copy-paste an AI-generated sentence, ask yourself once: “Can I explain what this phrase actually means?” If you want to go deeper, I recommend reading Orwell’s original essay itself. It’s only 14 pages, and reads more easily than you’d expect. It’s in English, but good translations exist too.

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📎 References & Further Reading

• George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, Horizon, 1946. : The core text behind today’s issue. A 14-page essay that’s remarkably intuitive to read.
• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), Secker & Warburg, 1949. : Pairs well with the essay. “Newspeak” is the extreme, fictionalized form of the language decay Orwell describes in the essay.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922. : The original source of the proposition “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Reading it alongside Orwell deepens your understanding of the relationship between language and thought.

The author, Kwangseob Ahn, is a professor of business administration at Sejong University and lead consultant at OBF (Oswarld Boutique Consulting Firm). He teaches statistics and data analysis — business data management and business analytics — while leading GTM and AI strategy consulting in the field, designing the seam between technology and business. He has published academic research on a memory architecture for AI dialogue systems (HEMA) and runs Daily Arxiv, a daily curation of global AI papers. He holds a master’s from Korea University’s Graduate School of Technology Management and a KMBA. He is the author of Homo Brainless: The People Who Outsource Their Thinking.

Footnotes

1. George Orwell: British writer (1903–1950), born Eric Arthur Blair. Famous for Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Known for writing grounded in direct experience — he fought in the Spanish Civil War himself — and spent his career examining the relationship between totalitarianism and the manipulation of language. ↩

2. Propaganda: Information activity that deliberately manipulates public beliefs, emotions, and behavior to serve a particular ideology or group’s interests. Its main tools are selective emphasis of facts, emotional appeals, and repeated exposure. ↩

3. Doublespeak: A concept from Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, referring to a use of language designed to make people accept two contradictory beliefs simultaneously — as in “War is Peace” — making a logically contradictory claim feel self-evident. ↩

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951): Austrian-born philosopher whose proposition that “the limits of language are the limits of the world” left a major mark on the philosophy of language. He argued that what cannot be expressed in language cannot be thought either. ↩

5. LLM (Large Language Model): The technology underlying generative AI systems like GPT and Claude. Trained on vast quantities of text to generate natural-sounding sentences, with the structural tendency to generate whatever expressions appeared most frequently in its training data. ↩