George Orwell Metaphors

I should just go on record at the very beginning as saying that I think George Orwell is a schmuck. I don't like him, his writing, or his attitude. If that colors what I'm about to say about him, it's hardly surprising.

Here I am, replying to a piece written 60 years ago by a dead man. I must have a life. I disagree with a lot of it, but the part with which I really disagree is laid out hereunder, so I can inflate the size of this. Also so you can read it, but mostly for the first reason.

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.

I would just like to take exception to his pronouncement that the metaphors are dead. For one thing, he's got his phrases wrong. These aren't metaphors, they're clichés. They once probably were metaphors, it's true, just as many cultural references were, but now they are shorthand, as he says, which makes them not dying metaphors but clichés.

Perhaps we'd be better off with no clichés at all in the world. Perhaps when I wanted to say, "his Achilles heel," I should instead always say, "his one point of mortal weakness." Maybe. How exactly that will improve my readability is something of which I'm not certain. But the fact of the matter is that, "Achilles heel," is a useful shorthand. It's no longer a metaphor because we don't even think about the original for comparison purposes. We know (or should know) what an Achilles heel is, and we don't even think about the myth.

Most of what Mr. Orwell is decrying is the use of too many words when fewer would do, and that I can support. But there's always the question of how many fewer will in fact do. We could, I suppose, live in the blessed world of NewSpeak and use practically no vocabulary at all. But the beauty of the English language, when it comes to writing, is that there are so many different ways to say things.

I'm sure he doesn't want us to stop using metaphors, just to make up our own. And that might work, were it not for the fact that many metaphors rely on a shared cultural vocabulary, which we, increasingly, don't have. I imagine that there are a lot of the so-called metaphors listed above which people would not recognize, let alone understand. There are a few I've never heard. So yes, to use them would be like using foreign words.

Speaking of foreign words, George, how exactly do you think that English got most of its vocabulary? Parthenogenesis? That's a good two-dollar word that doesn't come from English, but which serves its purpose.

At some point I will join with George in decrying the overuse of jargon in society. But not all language is jargon, and I think we would risk losing the beauty of the language if we stripped out all of the fluff. Some of it, of course, could probably go.