Irony in Orwell's writing
Orwell’s language throughout the essay is thick with irony. For example, in the following passage in which he gives examples of common uses of poor English, he uses quotes that seem absurdly bad. Ironically, he says that they aren’t “especially bad”:
“These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad—I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen—but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so I can refer back to them when necessary:
1. 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. Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder. Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa). …” The list goes on. (251)
Irony in Orwell's writing, examples
Orwell says,
"The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash – as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting-pot – it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking." (255)
Orwell here invents an absurd metaphors and he mixes them in a ridiculous way to demonstrate his point about writers not having a a clear image of the points they are making.
The irony of bad political writing
The following quote is a good example of the irony Orwell highlights in bad political writing:
"The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say ‘In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption’ that than to say ‘I think.’" (254)
It seems counterintuitive or even wrong to think that the longer, more complex sentence is easier to use than the simple, direct “I think.” Aware of this irony, Orwell places the two sentences together and allows them to make his point for him: namely that clear, direct, honest language is much harder for political writers to use. It's easier for them to hide behind abstract sentences. The complex sentence distances the writer from the opinion that they are about to present.
The irony of poor thinking
Throughout the essay, Orwell points out the ironic effect of political writers’ lack of critical thought. An example is in the following quote, where he claims that not only do writers’ use dead metaphors, they use they use them without even understanding the original meaning:
“…toe the line is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it.” (253)
