If you hear or read a term or phrase repeatedly, you should treat it with suspicion.
This is my first rule of writing. It is a rule essential to both good writing and clear analysis, and has a distinguished precedent:
As George Orwell explained in his essay Politics and the English Language, the use of stock phrases and clichés is a symptom of intellectual laziness, where writers reach for preconstructed language rather than thinking carefully about what they actually mean – and, especially, the implications of the words they use. Generic, recycled language makes writing vague and imprecise. It conceals meaning, rather than clarifying it. Orwell argued that using habitual phrases does the thinking on the writer’s behalf and weakens critical engagement with the subject matter.
Orwell also believed that as these standardised and repeated terms and phrases spread through politics, journalism, and academia, they create an information environment of conformity without independent judgement. They anaesthetise the minds of both the writer and the reader, which makes us all easier to manipulate.
The key to being a good writer – or a good reader – is to keep a vigilant watch, to develop a mental list of terms to avoid and recoil when you read them. While some ubiquitous terms – like “so-called” – eat away at good faith and entrench cynicism, it is the shibboleth which directly attacks our critical faculties.
We are currently drowning in shibboleths – mass immigration, diversity, globalist, inclusion, uniparty, lived experience, woke, settler-colonialism, late-stage capitalism, family values, marginalised communities, Judeo-Christian, silence is violence, deep state, real people, the science is settled, fake news. Each serves as a substitute for an actual argument and is often used to conceal the user's true intent.
This repetitive use of language is not meant to explain a position but to foreclose debate on an issue. It is intended to be repeated rather than examined, to accumulate an emotional connection through familiarity, rather than earn agreement through reason. Behind this terminology is a choice about what to emphasise and what to obscure.
Those susceptible to authoritarianism tend to gravitate towards shibboleths because they implicitly understand that language is often the highest form of control. When language becomes normalised and institutionalised, it carries with it an ideological lens. Adopting a group’s vocabulary means internalising its ideas.
This use of language functions as a loyalty test. It is not only designed to signal whether someone is “inside” or “outside” a political community, but also to serve a disciplinary function. Refusing to conform linguistically arouses suspicion. It may not be enough to support a broad political objective; you are also pressured to use approved language. It is a test of conformity and obedience.
The power of shibboleths is that they simplify complex realities into easily repeatable terms and phrases. These can then be transmitted online, across activist communities and into the media, universities, political parties, governments and other institutions. Once embedded, they create what Orwell warned: formulaic language that substitutes for independent thought.
This does not mean that a shorthand is inherently bad. All societies require a way of communicating complex ideas in digestible packages. We cannot debate our big political issues without a vocabulary that can provide some orientation to the matters we need to discuss. The problem is when this language shifts from serving a descriptive purpose to becoming a substitute for analysis.
When the language around an issue has been pre-loaded with tribal meaning, then proper scrutiny becomes impossible, as the words themselves tend to shut down any critique before it can even begin.
A writer’s job is to explore a subject, seek its merit and value, to navigate nuance and complexity, to understand assumptions, outcomes and implications, and to make a compelling argument that highlights these. The job requires rigour and clarity of thought, to put aside the pull of political emotions and search for what is accurate and defensible.
A writer’s instinct should be to question why a term or phrase is being repeated. Who is using it, why are they using it, what is it obscuring, and what does its repetition tell you about the incentives of those who repeat it?
This leads to another important writing rule – A writer should reluctantly belong to groups and think independently of them whenever possible. Political parties, labels, sides, and identities should all be treated with great caution.
To define yourself primarily through a party or a label is to risk outsourcing your brain to others. It encourages you to fall into line with a group, clouding your ability to scrutinise with rigour. Giving yourself a label also encourages others to project opinions onto you that you may not hold.
This doesn’t mean not having political opinions, and it certainly doesn’t mean forgoing principles or a worldview. It is simply reserving the right to approach a subject on its merit, not filter it through a group position. It is about having the confidence to own your brain, to be secure in yourself, and to want to be an individual with independent ideas.
This is, of course, easier said than done. We are group-based animals, as for most of human history, being part of a group was a matter of survival. It meant protection, resources, and collective knowledge. Exclusion often meant death. When we feel insecure, we retreat into groups instinctively.
This pull towards belonging may be natural, but it is a major political problem, as, rather than gaining safety, retreating into groups makes us feel more threatened by other people doing likewise. This impulse has contributed to our modern political environment: one that heightens insecurity, eats away at individual confidence, and makes it far more difficult to analyse ideas on merit.
To break this cycle, writers should keep as far away from activist language as possible. Even when you agree with an idea, the objective should be to explain and advocate for it in your own words. This is the key to persuasion: to want to keep the reader engaged with an argument until the last sentence.
This reader engagement is undermined by the process of coding. The retreat into groups means that we are always looking for shortcuts to know which is “our team”. Here, terms and phrases – or yes or no responses to specific topics – get coded as either left or right, and then people position themselves accordingly. To write persuasively is to explain ideas in a way that bypasses this instinct, reaching the reader without activating the tribal reflex.
Coding gives the impression of thinking, but it is instead filing – placing an idea in a cabinet and closing the drawer, rather than taking the time to consider its worth, consequences, and meaning. What gets lost when we file is what actually matters most: whether the idea is true, whether it works, who it harms, and who it serves. These are inconvenient questions, and coding prevents them from being asked.
The great paradox is that intellectual elites are often the worst offenders at doing such filing. Rather than interrogating ideas, they instead compress them into approved categories – becoming designators of what an issue is and where it is placed in a conventional political framework, rather than analysts of what it means. Education becomes a mechanism through which linguistic codes are transmitted and normalised.
This is especially dangerous when it reaches institutions. Without the skills to interrogate language, these codes become embedded in governments, universities, and media organisations – and once internalised, they become self-reinforcing and difficult to remove. To advance within these institutions, it becomes a requirement to repeat the designated vocabulary.
When this happens, the purpose of these institutions starts to erode – governments risk legislating policies without sufficient scrutiny; universities can become less capable of cultivating complex thought and advancing knowledge; and the media creates intense polarisation that eats away at social cohesion and political stability.
Here, the writer should stand as a bulwark. The discipline is to develop a keen eye for how language is being used and misused. This means constantly testing terms and phrases for truth, effect, and intent, and remaining alert to how language can be used as a form of subterfuge, as authoritarian movements especially use language that is the opposite of its intent. Being attuned to repetition makes us less likely to fall for the ruse.
The responsibility of the writer is to expose logical fallacies and philosophical discrepancies that sloppy or dishonest language conceals. This is not merely intellectual rigour; it also produces far better prose. For it is not just the honest use of language that should be the writer’s focus, but the compelling nature of their ideas. The elegance of delivery is a demonstration of the quality of the analysis.
It is also a mark of respect for the reader. The writer’s aim is to earn the reader’s trust, and this trust isn’t genuinely earned through shibboleths. The purpose of these devices is to cajole and corral people, offering the reader neither curiosity nor contemplation. The appeal to tribalism implicitly concedes the weakness of an argument by abandoning persuasion in favour of reflex.
It is here that the responsibility rests with the reader, too. The reader who develops the same vigilance, who learns to notice when language is doing the thinking for them, becomes much harder to manipulate and harder to herd. This is because good writing and good reading are the same discipline. Both require the confidence to refuse borrowed thoughts.