It’s been some time since I started this fledging category of Reasons to Read and hopefully in writing this post I can give the curious reader one more reason. The first reason to read was to confirm what you’ve been thinking. The second reason to read is not unlike it: one should read because some things just stick in the memory and haunt you for hours and sometimes days (and sometimes longer, if you’re lucky).

Reading feeds the mind and produces cud that can be regurgitated at moments of boredom or leisure.

Cud: the portion of food that a ruminant returns from the first stomach to the mouth to chew a second time (Dictionary.com). Some things you read just need that second chew. Believe me, you’ll know what those things are when you read them; if you don’t, you need to quickly develop an eye for what those things are because they will come back to haunt you when you go to chew them that second time but find that they’ve lost their flavor (i.e., you can’t remember exactly how that quote went or where you read that blog post about such and such). I have a whole folder of bookmarks of articles, blog posts and pages I’ve read that I thought might come back to haunt me later.

One such writing is George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language which I have recently discovered by way of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Here’s a full version of the essay (it’s fairly short and an overall fun read).

What particularly in the essay has led to ruminant tendencies in my thought life? Six little rules to cut “out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally”:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

As I read and write more and more, I become ever convinced that metaphors and similes are key. Orwell takes it one step further though and warns the writer against using hackneyed phrases in rule #1 above. “Once upon a time…” needs to become “in a galaxy far far away.” What do you think about the image of cud I used in the paragraphs above? To my knowledge I’ve not seen this metaphor employed in print before though it seems obvious enough and I don’t doubt it’s in print even now; nonetheless it serves well. I want to strive to imagine concepts in vibrant metaphor never before seen in print in order that I might not surrender to the expressions of others. Orwell’s point in giving the six rule speaks to this (emphasis mine of course):

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is 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 visualizing you probably hunt about until 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 meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person.

Hopefully something from Orwell (or from me) will stick in your mind and prove that because some things just stick is one more reason to read.

Happy regurgitating!