What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

like a cuttlefish spurting out ink

Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means

The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot

Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness.

If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. 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. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page.

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Here it is in modern English: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.

The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness’,

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning[2]. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader.

It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

status quo

Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality

with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion,

Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line.

As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed

The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.

If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul.

. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic Fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.

Interglossia

Essay in Freedom of Expression

I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

Faculty members who believed that AI posed a threat argued that its usage would undermine academic integrity, students’ critical thinking and writing skills, and creativity. Administrators who felt positively about AI focused on the need to prepare students for an AI-infused workplace, and said that it could spur new ways of thinking about problems and enhance learning through tools such as AI tutors.

“Nobody likes talking about short-term operational thinking. It’s just not an exciting thing to do,” he says. “People would rather talk about the big picture and how the world is going to change than the nuts and bolts of how to operate every day.”

Even AI-savvy professors, he has noticed, share this feeling of being untethered from truth when they read students’ writing. “These intense feelings come and go. You feel like you’ve got it all figured out and got a plan. Then you read something and it throws you off again.”

So this fall, he plans to scrap many of his writing assignments, including the experiential-learning one that was once so meaningful to many of his students. “Because of those people at the bottom of the scale making it impossible for me to do my work,” he says of AI users, “all those people at the upper end of the scale will never have that good experience.” Some of those better students might even have chosen to become religious-studies majors. ADVERTISEMENT Instead, he will assign less writing and less deep reading, because students’ work in that area is now difficult to assess. He will rely more on lectures and in-class, handwritten exams.

“I do feel a little worried about the future of our students and their training and skills moving forward. But I can’t individually do anything to shut that down or change it. It’s more providing a good example for them. It’s about being a moral compass and showing them that good direction,” he says. “If they choose to abuse it, I kind of believe in karma. ... The world will catch up to them and check them in ways that will damage their career trajectories.”

he could supplement his high-level comments with ChatGPT’s specific recommendations. Nearly all of his students, he says, found it helpful and accurate. “I still feel a little guilty about using AI,” he says. “But it worked.”

Still, he is careful, he says, to design questions that he thinks AI would do a mediocre job answering, at best. He asked them to describe, for example, what important concept for understanding how government and politics works is widely misunderstood by the American public. They also had to cite research, explain how democracy would work better if people understood the concept, and consider what they might have gotten wrong about the argument.

“But over all, it struck me that most students massively failed to fully take advantage of AI to improve their papers.”

use generative AI (he prefers one called Claude) to improve the writing in their papers. He sees that as akin to asking a classmate to read over a final draft.

‘Well, now that we have all these tools that cut out some of these menial tasks that students have been accustomed to doing, students have to do more. They have to be required to do more of this higher-order, critical-thinking work that they can’t possibly do with AI.’”

Her response: It’s her job to ensure students develop basic writing skills, and the noticeable uptick in AI use is impeding those efforts.

‘This is amazing. I no longer have to read ever again for anything I have to do because it turns any sort of digital document into a CliffsNotes on demand.’ I didn’t even think about that before I deployed it.”

He liked the idea that the tool could help students with hidden disabilities or those who struggle with English as a second language. “I thought at the time this would be great,” he recalls.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu, which aims to expand generative AI’s use on college campuses.

AI tools can now listen to and summarize a lecture, as well as read and summarize long academic articles.

encourages them to experiment with the tools in their teaching but without providing tested examples of how to do so.

Some, like Wilson, are despairing over its interference with authentic learning, and deeply worried they will have to scuttle the meaningful assignments and assessments they’ve developed over the years because they have become too easily cheatable. Others agree that AI abuse is a problem but focus instead on how AI could enhance learning

“I’ve been teaching at this university for 17 years and suddenly this comes along to devalue everything I’ve done to become a caring, competent instructor, and the students are creating make-work for me,”

A few didn’t know they had used generative AI because it’s embedded in so many other tools, like Grammarly.