It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.'

They will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you - concealing your meaning even from yourself. The main enemy, he believed, was insincerity, which hides behind the long words and empty phrases that stand between what is said and what is really meant.Ī scrupulous writer, Orwell notes, will ask himself: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What fresh image will make it clearer? Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? The alternative is simply 'throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. Orwell's proposition is that modern English, especially written English, is so corrupted by bad habits that it has become impossible to think clearly. Over the years, I've gone back to it repeatedly, like a student visiting an old professor who always has something new to reveal. It was then, in 1946, that Orwell wrote his great essay, 'Politics and the English Language,' which I first read as a freshman at Tulane University and immediately adopted as my guide. Orwell's own country, England, was suffering through a political crisis, as it struggled to find the will to resist the new threat. But through most of his career, Orwell was known for his journalism and his rigorous, unsparing essays, which documented a time that seems in some ways so much like our own.Īt the end of World War II, one form of totalitarianism - fascism - had been defeated but another - communism - was spreading across Europe and Asia. Most people these days think of George Orwell as a writer for high-school students, since his reputation rests mostly on two late novels - Animal Farm and 1984 - that are seldom read outside the classroom. And the series continues all summer long on NPR.org. All Things Considered talks with writers about their favorite buttonhole books. All readers have them - and so do writers. Technology Al Qaeda Using Internet to Spread Terrorist MessageĬall them buttonhole books, the ones you urge passionately on friends, colleagues and passersby.

Essays by george orwell