Notes on Orwell, Kimmerer, and Macfarlane: Language, Animacy, and Landspeak
Politics and the English Language (George Orwell)
Central claim: English is in a bad state not merely due to individual bad writers, but due to political and economic forces; language decline both reflects and reinforces foolish thoughts, and it is reversible with effort.
Core argument:
Language is an instrument we shape for our purposes; decline arises from slovenliness that spreads by imitation.
Reversibility: rid oneself of bad habits to think more clearly, which is a prerequisite for political regeneration. Writing improvement is not only the concern of professional writers.
Modern English, especially in political writing, suffers from habits that make ambiguous or vague thought appear precise.
Five specimen passages (illustrative of common vices, not the worst):
1) Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression): complex, hedged, and alien for akin (alien for akin) due to negative wording and slips.
2) Hogben (Interglossia): anti-simple idioms and awkward collocations; calls out the phrase “put up with” being used wrongly and the difficulty of looking up everyday words.
3) Essay on psychology in Politics (New York): the free personality defined in terms of abstract institutional phrases; questions about where such language leaves room for real meaning.
4) Best people (gentlemen’s clubs, fascist captains): inflammatory, demonizing language that coalesces around social hatred and provocation.
5) BBC reform (Timidity here will bespeak canker…): grandiose, arch metaphors and inflated language; the danger of public rhetoric masking weak substance.Common faults across all five passages:
Two shared qualities: staleness of imagery and lack of precision.
Prose tends to melt concreteness into abstract generalities; it sacrifices clarity for pretentiousness.
Prose relies on phrases rather than careful word choice, leading to vagueness and incompetence.
Key concepts and categories (tricks of prose to dodge clear thinking):
Dying metaphors: newly invented metaphors briefly evoke imagery but die, while worn-out metaphors persist and stifle original thought.
Examples of dead/worn metaphors and mixed metaphors: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder, etc.; toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line; hammer and anvil misused.
Operators or verbal false limbs: over-long phrases that pad sentences; replacement of simple verbs with phrases (e.g., militate against, give rise to, take effect); passive voice used instead of active; noun constructions used instead of gerunds; -ize and de- formations; the -not un- formation.
Pretentious diction: Latin/Greek roots or jargon used to “dress up” simple statements; adjectives that imply grandiosity (epoch-making, epic, historic, inevitable, etc.); overuse of foreign phrases.
Foreign words and expressions: overuse to imply culture; Latin/Greek roots favored; Marxist jargon often translated from other languages.
Meaningless words: abstractions like romantic, values, dead, living; words with multiple meanings (democracy, socialism, freedom, justice) used inconsistently; statements like “The Soviet press is the freest in the world” used dishonestly.
How this leads to political deceit: democratic and totalitarian labels become porous, language serves to conceal rather than reveal.
The mechanics of bad writing and thought control:
A scrupulous writer asks four questions for each sentence:
What am I trying to say?
What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
Two additional self-checks:
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
The connection to politics:
In our time, political writing is bad writing; orthodoxies across parties share a lifeless, imitative style.
Empty phrases and ready-made abstractions anesthetize the mind and defend indefensible political positions.
The inflation of language is a symptom of, and a tool for, political manipulation.
Practical implications and call to action:
Language reform does not mean archaism or artificial standardization; it means scrapping worn-out terms and choosing concise, precise words.
Avoid over-reliance on slogans and euphemisms; combat euphemistic language by clarifying meaning and imagery.
Simple, concrete language helps citizens think clearly and resist manipulation.
Final guidance and principles:
Language should be guided by meaning, not by the lure of Latinized style or fashionable jargon.
When in doubt, simplify; prioritize plain speech that communicates truth over rhetorical flourish.
The list of explicit rules and the five specimens illustrate how to diagnose and discard bad habits in real writing.
Learning the Grammar of Animacy (Robin Wall Kimmerer)
Core thesis: Western science languages emphasize distance and objectivity, reducing living beings to working parts; to heal our relationship with the natural world, we need a grammar of animacy that treats the world as full of living subjects rather than inert objects.
Personal journey and context:
The author describes gathering an indigenous lexicon (puhpowee) from Anishinaabe sources; recognizing that science lacks a term to hold the life force and emergence she observes in fungi.
She contrasts science’s descriptive, object-oriented vocabulary with a language that names life, energy, and relation.
Puhpowee and the missing language of life:
Pu h powee translates as "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight"; a word that embodies life’s emergence and agency.
Western science lacks a term for such life-force phenomena; science often labels phenomena by their observable parts rather than their animate participation.
Potawatomi language as a case study in animacy:
Potawatomi has a grammar of animacy where verbs encode being and life; animate vs. inanimate is a central dichotomy, not just human vs. object.
In Potawatomi, nouns and verbs are classified as animate or inanimate; even rocks, water, and places can be animate and described with living verbs.
Example contrasts: to say a table is a thing (Dopwen yewe) but to say a bay is living (wiikwegama: to be a bay) because water is alive; verbs carry life, not static identity.
The language of kinship and respect:
The grammar of animacy challenges the habit of calling non-human beings “it” and emphasizes kinship with living beings.
The living world is addressed as family: yawe is the animate verb “to be,” used for living relations, not just humans.
Living vs. dead grammar in practice:
The author notes that English frequently fails to express animacy; translating or addressing non-human beings as mere objects erodes ethical regard.
The distinction between animate and inanimate shapes how we speak about water, land, and life itself; treating life as kin changes moral consideration.
Implications for science and education:
Teaching science should integrate an animacy-aware language: emphasize process, relations, and life in description rather than reduction to parts.
The goal is not to abandon science but to balance precise observation with reverence for living systems.
Moral and ecological vision:
The idea that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects (Thomas Berry reference).
A grammar of animacy invites a political and ethical shift: greater moral inclusion to non-human beings, and a recognition of their standing.
Personal and communal outcomes:
The author describes a learning process with Potawatomi language learners, including challenges like verb-heavy structure and differences in animacy between words for living entities and inanimate objects.
The practice of language revival involves community gatherings, teaching, and the emotional weight of preserving a living tradition.
Key storytelling and examples:
The nine fluent speakers at a tribal language class; the elder’s reflection on language’s heart of culture; the grandfather and grandmother anecdotes about boarding schools; the loneliness of language loss and the joy of revival.
Everyday life examples show how animacy changes perception: people say, for instance, “Someone is in my hat” instead of “my hat has someone on it.”
Ethical dimension and critique of dominance:
The author critiques anthropocentrism and urges biologists and educators to adopt a language that recognizes the agency of animals, plants, and ecosystems.
The practice of mixing English with Potawatomi vernacular demonstrates the dynamic, lived reality of bilingual or multilingual environments.
Takeaway rules for animacy-minded communication (parallels with Orwell’s approach):
Use verbs that reflect life and relation; avoid treating the entire world as an inert set of objects.
Recognize the moral weight of pronouns and personhood when referring to non-human beings.
Concluding vision:
Learning a grammar of animacy expands our moral universe and invites a more reciprocal relationship with the living world; language becomes a tool for ecological justice and cultural revival.
Landspeak (Robert Macfarlane)
Central idea: The vocabulary of landscape — place-words — is vanishing as daily life becomes uprooted from nature; the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s deletions of nature terms dramatize this erosion, while new indoor/virtual terms rise to fill the gap.
The peat glossary and the loss of landscape literacy:
Macfarlane discovered a Gaelic “Peat Glossary” on Lewis, revealing hundreds of terms for moorland that mark intimate knowledge of land.
By contrast, the Oxford Junior Dictionary (2015 edition) dropped basic nature words (acorn, adder, beech, bluebell, fern, heron, mistletoe, otter, etc.) and replaced them with indoor/virtual terms (block-graph, blog, broadband, MP3 player, voice-mail).
The substitutions signal a shift from outdoor/natural literacy to indoor/technological literacy, eroding a foundational vocabulary for sensing and relating to place.
The cultural and cognitive cost:
Loss of place-words equates to a loss of a kind of word magic; landscape terms are not mere labels but enact relationships with place.
The author cites Henry Porter on the OUP deletions: the natural world’s euphonious vocabulary becomes part of it; losing terms depletes the imagination and perception.
Concrete examples of landscape and nature vocabulary:
ammil (Devon): “the sparkle of morning sunlight through hoar-frost”
Shetlandic pirr: “a light breath of wind” that makes a cat’s paw on the water
klett (Exmoor): a low-lying, earth-fast rock on the seashore
zwer (Exmoor): the sound of a covey of partridges taking flight
smeuse (Sussex): gap in a hedge made by small animal passage
blinter: cold dazzle or ice-splinters catching light; radiance of winter stars on a clear night; the effect of ice-dust refracting sunlight
The broader claim about language and landscape:
There is no single mountain language or coastal language; there is a fractal of languages each tied to place.
New landscape terms are being created (e.g., landskein for horizon lines) and new flexible vocabularies for landscape are emerging from poets and children alike.
The role of language in shaping perception and policy:
A rich landscape vocabulary fosters attention, care, and imaginative engagement with the environment; a lean vocabulary supports extractive or technocratic thinking.
Macfarlane suggests that a revival of landspeak could enrich public discourse and policymaking about land use and environment.
The closing vision:
Landspeak argues for a plural, landscape-rich lexicon that keeps pace with ecological complexity and cultural diversity.
The piece ends with the claim that we have forgotten many words but will create more, and that language for place is a vital instrument for living well with the natural world.
Connections and implications across the three texts
Language as a tool for shaping reality:
Orwell argues that language shapes thought and political action; Kimmerer argues that the language we use conditions our sense of kinship with the living world; Macfarlane argues that landscape vocabularies shape how we imagine and interact with place.
Ethics and politics:
Orwell links linguistic sloppiness to political manipulation and the defense of indefensible actions; Kimmerer links animacy language to moral consideration for non-human beings; Macfarlane links word loss to ecological literacy and stewardship.
Practical habits for students and readers:
Emphasize clarity and concreteness; question clichés and euphemisms (Orwell).
Learn and practice language that recognizes animacy and relationality with the natural world (Kimmerer).
Expand landscape vocabulary and cultivate a habit of naming places and phenomena with precise, place-based terms (Macfarlane).
Interdisciplinary relevance:
Writing and rhetoric, cognitive linguistics, ecology, anthropology, indigenous language revitalization, and environmental policy cohere around the idea that language both reveals and constructs reality.
Quick reference: key terms and ideas
Orwell: dying metaphors; verbal false limbs; pretentious diction; meaningless words; Latin/Greek jargon; “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity”; six guiding questions for writers; rule to break rules if needed; politics as the defender of the indefensible.
Kimmerer: puhpowee; grammar of animacy; yawe; animate vs. inanimate; to be a bay; Spanawatomi; the nine fluent speakers; the prayer that language revival will endure; “the universe is a communion of subjects.”
Macfarlane: peat glossary; Oxford Junior Dictionary deletions; landspeak terms (ammil, pirr, klett, zwer, smeuse, blinter); the shift from outdoor to indoor vocabularies; “We have forgotten ten thousand words for our landscapes, but we will make ten thousand more, given time.”