Response to Politics and the English Language

Orwell is such a famous writer, works such as Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm will forever ring throughout time as classics, unless of course those stories actually come true. He coined the words and phrases like Big Brother, doublethink, newspeak, and others. It is only rather fitting that he comment on the type of vague ideas that he himself wrote about. In Politics in the English Language Orwell talks about the vagueness of our very own language and then sets up some rules for creating better writing that hasn’t been duped up with common phrases.

In his argument Orwell states that metaphors have become stale and have lost their meaning because nobody even understands the word picture anymore. A metaphor should bring a mental image to somebody’s head, not the other way around. In my lifetime alone is the phrase “Google it” is becoming useless. It is no longer synonymous with Google. While some people perhaps will still use Google, the phrase now more or less means “Look it up”. It doesn’t have to be Google and we see this type of phrase we don’t necessarily associate it with Google anymore. This only proves Orwell’s point about the English language becoming stale.

“It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.” We may laugh at this and call it absurd but it is a personification of the English language. All people regardless of who they are do this. We all run on social and verbal scripts that we don’t even have to think about. This is most evident when somebody greets you or tells you to “have a nice day”. We do not even begin to think about the response, instead we simply respond with a pre-determined script from both behavior and langage by saying something like “Pretty good, how about yourself?” or “you too”.

In fact, this is only made all the more evident when something is out of place. Take for instance if you are getting on a flight (as I once watched a friend do) and your standing back at security tells you to “have a great flight” and you respond automatically with the phrase “you too!” (as I once did). When it comes down to it, Orwell creates a simple, if not rather ironic, set of rules for people when speaking English. But even more so, he creates a “beware of” list. By showing the phrases for their true meaning he tears off the white washed mask that politics hide behind to show the more grotesque one that lays beneath it.