Response to the Politics and English Language

George Orwell wrote the Politics and English Language to argue that the decline and abuse of English should attribute to politics. He also made some advice for readers to avoid the faults.

First Orwell disagreed that the assumption that the collapse of English is a nature and people cannot do anything to stop it. In the second paragraph, he directly attacked this assumption. Orwell believed that bad language made bad thought and bad thought made the language worse. He claimed that “It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”, and his view was that this process is reversible if people are willing.

The five examples Orwell gave all had something that was difficult to understand. Some had inappropriate words and some used vague expression and phrases. All of these made the meanings of the writers unclear. Another common, by the theory of Orwell, is these examples could not give readers imagery.

Orwell listed four “tricks”: Dying Metaphors, Operator or Verbal False Limbs, Pretentious Diction, and Meaningless Words. I think that Pretentious Diction is more misleading than other three. Because the result that the other three may lead is that readers cannot understand the writer’s idea, however, the Pretentious Diction will mislead readers. As Orwell’s example: “Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification”, the words “pacification” will give readers an opposite feeling than the facts.

The reasons of the slovenliness can be divided into two types. One is that political writings meaningly make fault to glorify atrocities. Orwell gave an example of the English professors who defended the Russian totalitarianism. Another reason is that people tend to use ready-made phrases