George Orwell's Politics And The English Language

Over the past few years, the English language is seemingly getting worse as each year passes by. Through George Orwell’s essay, Politics and the English Language Orwell gives us insight to the ongoing problem in the English language, although the essay was published in 1946, it is still an evident problem today. Additionally, Orwell talks about how the English language can become “ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts” (Paragraph 2). Over time, the English language has overall, not improved, Orwell points out in his essay that writers use meaningless words to evoke meaning into their pieces of writing, political writing now “consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer
Some meaningless words include “romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, and vitality” (Paragraph 4). Some of these words are jargon words, meaning it might be difficult for the readers to understand, or they might have an abundance of meanings. Orwell presumes that political writing and speech is are much like “the defense of the indefensible” (Paragraph 8). Politics try to defend something yet clearly it is wrong, consequently because of “politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia” (Paragraph 9), this makes the language corrupted and bad, due to it being linked with lies. Politics use large words and very old and overuse of idioms coupled with a large amount of information thrown into speeches and writing making overwhelming “like a cuttlefish squirting out ink”, which immensely deteriorates the English language over time. English has fallen as a victim to slangs, which are words that are very informal, and it greatly affected the English