
George Orwell - Politics and the English Language - gnosis
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
======
ATB
This is a very popular essay which tends to get posted around the web quite
often.

Yet it suffers from many not-so-obvious flaws, as analyzed in the popular
linguistics blog "Language Log." The commentary is written in a calmly
analytical style (interspersed with some judicious jibes) that I think many
YC.HN readers will find rather agreeable ("a beautifully written language
crime, though it pretends to lay down the law") ---

<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992>

The entire 'Prescriptivist Poppycock' category at Language Log is generally
good reading: <http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5>

~~~
gnosis
Orwell himself says,

 _"Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have
again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against."_

So he is not claiming that he has attained perfection in his own prose. But he
is not after perfection. He just wants to encourage us to write better.

------
hristov
This is brilliant. I am pretty sure I read it before, but I do not mind
rereading it.

It would be interesting to think about present political discourse and try to
find the words that were created solely to avoid saying the truth.

One thing that surprised me is that some of the words he criticised as
unnecessary foreign words, seemed completely and utterly English to me. For
example, I did not know these words were foreign: "expedite, ameliorate,
predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine." I guess Orwell really lost
that battle.

~~~
philwelch
He likely means "foreign" in a more classical sense: Orwell tends to favor
Anglo-Saxon derived words over Norman French-derived words. "Freedom" rather
than "liberty", for instance. This is a reaction to the centuries-old stigma
against Anglo-Saxon derived words as being crude or inelegant.

------
raffi
I'm a big fan of this essay. I wrote a blog post about how After the Deadline
(a proofreading software service) relates to the rules George Orwell talks
about.

[http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2009/12/16/george-orwell-
an...](http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2009/12/16/george-orwell-and-after-
the-deadline/)

------
vorador
I wonder if this also applies to software. For instance, do you know some
ready-made patterns that we could do without ?

~~~
gnosis
That's an interesting question. But unfortunately for Orwell, programming is
geared greatly towards reuse. So software "cliches" are valued, if they are
effective.

~~~
cromulent
"Software cliche" is a great term to have coined.

I love the origin of the word cliche, from a cluster of movable type
permanently set for common phrases. Metal macros.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliché>

