DS:
I'd wanted to respond last week but found myself mired in busywork. I try not to respond hastily because I grew up among friends who insulted one other for the aesthetic pleasure -- you should have seen us cupping our chins and nodding vigorously at one another's most savory invective -- and so my tone, if unmonitored, can sound harsher than intended.
I tend to think Orwell's list is irrelevant. To trash his rules because of items on his usage list is not only too literal but impractical -- and there are many precedents.
Nabokov hated the verbal manifestations of self-satisfied banality, which he liked to call
Poshlost, but his examples of
Poshlost often seem more intolerant than apt. Yet the absence of banality in his own work is exemplary, which means that the principle of avoidance which guided it is far more important than the specific phrases he hated and discarded.
Do yourself this solid: If ever you're able to see an exhibit of Nabokov's manuscripts, break prior engagements and go. If the exhibition is half as extensive as the one I visited for several days at the Donnell Library in NYC, you'll find texts so carefully written, you'd have thought better substitutions and revisions couldn't be made. Yet Nabokov made them -- endlessly -- and his choices were
unerring.
The first time I went to that exhibit, I made the mistake of looking at Yeats's manuscripts afterward (which were displayed on a lower floor). While brilliant in themselves, they seemed hopelessly vague after a few hours with Nabokov's.
From that day on, I studied Yeats's manuscripts first so as not to ruin my appreciation of them. That's how precise Nabokov's writing really is.
* * * *
Another problem with clichés is that reliance on them makes for flabby thought.
Here's an exercise based on personal (and possibly irrelevant) experience, but try it if you have the time: Write three pages describing a common event without using any stock phrases. Better yet, pretend that no stock phrases had ever existed and try to coin your own.
The idea is that the writing will be better, but in my experience, the writer's own thought and sense of awareness benefit as well. Avoiding clichés for, uh, extended periods makes me feel more alert critically and artistically. Writing vigorously while sidestepping clichés is an excellent way to begin one's daily relationship with the digital page -- I try to start when I wake up. The music of successive sentences will always carry me, and emotional rhythms and refrains create the narrative's groove and drive, but keenness of thought is what guarantees a worthy destination.
Lazer:
Perhaps you're assuming too much when you interpret Orwell as saying that one shouldn't write ordinary characters whose conversation consists of clichés:-- doing so is a conscious act; ideally, one is choosing those phrases in a critical context that resonates with readers who are wary of those kinds of expressions. One is casting a revealing light on the familiar.
Calculated mistakes in grammar and even punctuation can be filed in the same folder (I'm thinking of Ring Lardner's epistolary short stories in which the characters who write to one another are made to seem borderline illiterate).
Also: Orwell himself tells us to break the rules when necessary in Rule 6. Some people bristle at the word
barbarous, as if Orwell were being prissy, but what he's really saying is this: Listen to your own judgment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by doubleshuffle
It's really a pity that it's such a spiteful little article, for of course the author (Geoffrey Pullum, not Anne Curzan, btw) has some valid points. There are phrases and idioms that are basically harmless and useful, and quite a few of them are on Orwell's hate list quoted by Pullum. . . . Language, in order to be understood, needs a certain amount of familiarity. The question is how much. The answer should always be: as little as possible; how much that 'little' is will depend on the purpose of the text.
But, obviously, if that purpose is ultimate affirmation of the status quo, i.e. keeping yourself and your readers from any uncomfortable thinking, then the answer will be: pile on the clichés and create that warm, pleasant, mushy vibe of pseudo-thinking that will keep everybody's brains blissfully unaware of their own dullness.
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