
George Orwell: Politics and the English Language - bonefishgrill
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/
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lobster_johnson
A rebuttal, of sorts, by Louis Menard in the New Yorker:
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/27/honest-
decent-w...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/27/honest-decent-
wrong).

> “Big Brother” and “doublethink” and “thought police” are frequently cited as
> contributions to the language. They are, but they belong to the same
> category as “liar” and “pervert” and “madman.” They are conversation-
> stoppers. When a court allows videotape from a hidden camera to be used in a
> trial, people shout “Big Brother.” When a politician refers to his proposal
> to permit logging on national land as “environmentally friendly,” he is
> charged with “doublethink.” When a critic finds sexism in a poem, she is
> accused of being a member of the “thought police.” The terms can be used to
> discredit virtually any position, which is one of the reasons that Orwell
> became everyone's favorite political thinker. People learned to make any
> deviation from their own platform seem the first step on the slippery slope
> to “1984.”

[...]

> Orwell wrote many strong essays, but “Politics and the English Language,”
> published in 1946, is not one of them. Half of the essay is an attack on bad
> prose. Orwell is against abstractions, mixed metaphors, Latinate roots,
> polysyllabic words, clichés, and most of the other stylistic vices
> identified in Fowler's “Modern English Usage” (in its fourth printing in
> 1946). The other half is an attack on political dishonesty. Certain
> political terms, Orwell argues, are often used in a consciously dishonest
> way. ... Fowler would have found nothing to complain about, though, in the
> sentences Orwell objects to. They are as clear as can be. Somehow, Orwell
> has run together his distaste for flowery, stale prose with his distaste for
> fascism, Stalinism, and Roman Catholicism. He makes it seem that the problem
> with fascism (and the rest) is, at bottom, a problem of style. They're bad,
> we are encouraged to feel, because their language is bad, because they're
> ugly.

> This is not an isolated instance of this way of thinking in Orwell. From his
> earliest work, he was obsessed with body odor ... Smell has no relation to
> virtue, however. Ugliness has no relation to insincerity or evil, and short
> words with Anglo-Saxon roots have no relation to truth or goodness.
> Political speech, like etiquette, has its codes and its euphemisms, and
> Orwell is right to insist that it is important to be able to decipher them.
> He says that if what he calls political speech—by which he appears to mean
> political clichés—were translated into plain, everyday speech,

