Is Clear the New Obscure?

I have been a huge admirer of George Orwell ever since I read Animal Farm. Then there was 1984, which was so eerily prophetic that it made you wonder if the guy had managed to build a time machine…

Orwell also wrote a famous essay, “Politics and the English Language”, in 1946. His argument went pretty much like this:
“…the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words.”
But this may be the one time that Orwell got it wrong. Or possibly a case where politicians and corporate bigwigs wised up and started achieving the same goals as before by being clear!

Huh? Take a complex issue. Use a simple (ideally catchy) phrase to describe your view on that complex issue and bingo! It is memorable, hence likely to be repeated; it sounds like common sense, and hence accompanied with that sense of obviousness. Did I just define sound bytes? Isn’t that exactly what you hear on news channels and Twitter?

Turns out this technique extends to books as well: I personally like Malcolm Gladwell’s books (Blink, Tipping Point etc). But when Ed Smith termed that style as “Gladwellian”, the “technique of using apparently natural, authentic and conversational style to lull readers into misplaced trust”, it made me stop and wonder. After all, it is exactly that conversational style of writing that makes a whole lot of books so interesting…and best-sellers (think Freakonomics). Was all that just a way to sell more books?

Extending the above, consider what Thomas Macaulay once said: “The object of oratory is not truth, but persuasion”. The more I thought of that statement, the more depressing it felt. Example: Are TED talks now suspect?

Did we just move sideways from one form of obscurity to another? From hidden in twisted, complicated words to hidden in plain sight?

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