Politics and the English Language, January 2026 Edition

Wednesday, 28 January 2026

Patrick McGee (author of last year’s bestseller, Apple in China, and guest on The Talk Show in May), commenting on Twitter/X re: Tim Cook’s company-wide memo regarding the “events in Minneapolis”:

This literally says nothing, via intention and cowardice.

It’s the kind of language Orwell attributed to politicians, when ready-made phrases assemble themselves and prevent any real thought from breaking through.

I have previously linked to George Orwell’s seminal 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”. This time I’ll quote a different passage:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line”. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Now consider Cook’s memo. Cook avoids most of the sins Orwell describes. He uses short, common words. He eschews hackneyed metaphors. He uses the active, not passive, voice — for the most part. His prayers and sympathies are “with everyone that’s been affected.” Who, exactly, has been affected? Affected how? By whom? Numerous examples come to mind, but not from Cook’s memo. Two Minneapolitans were affected, quite adversely, by being shot in the head and back at point blank range, in broad daylight, by unhinged ICE goons. A five-year-old boy — himself a U.S.-born citizen — was affected when ICE agents apprehended his father, used the boy as bait to lure other family members, and is now being detained in a detention center in Texas.

The list is long, the stories searing. But Cook mentions nothing more specific than “everyone that’s been affected”. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them, indeed.

“This is a time for deescalation,” Cook wrote. But by whom? The masked federal agents laying siege to Minneapolis, brutalizing its citizenry? Or the thousands of law-abiding citizens protesting the occupation of their neighborhoods, who are, in the words of Seth Meyers, “deploying the most hurtful weapon of all, the bird”? Cook’s call for “deescalation” is meaningless without specifying which side he’s calling upon to change course, and there’s no weaker sauce than the weak sauce of “both sides”. Using words, not to make a point, but to avoid making a point while creating the illusion of having made one, is the true sin. From Orwell’s closing paragraph:

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

It’s colder in Minnesota, but the wind is gusting in Cupertino.