On George Orwell

George Orwell states in his essay "Politics and the English Language" that the English language has become decrepit. It is full of cliches, overly pretentious and unnecessary words, and purposefully complex arrangements of words that confuse and distort meaning. He urges us to follows some basic rules of writing to the tune of simplifying word choice and cutting common and foreign phrases out. For the most part, I wholeheartedly agree with his argument. Based on the five examples of how convoluted the use of the English language has become, anyone could agree that we are complicating a simple process. It certainly is good sense to remove the overused metaphors in order to inspire the creation of new ones, and he makes many good points in his different classifications of bad writing, especially his section on deceptive language, where I can see many parallels to current usages. His examples in this section are particularly apt. But I also disagree to a certain extent with what he is saying, as the English language has hundreds of thousands of words so that we can express ourselves as specifically as possible. Otherwise, following his logic, we would reduce the number of frequently used words tremendously. I'm sure that my writing in this response is clashing with a couple of Orwell's tenants already. For example, some of his examples of "Pretentious Diction" are definitely not common definitions of pretentious language, such as "effective, basic, objective, promote". I use these words frequently, as do many of the people around me. Orwell does make great points, and although some of them are dated, his main ideas come through, and we can agree that writing should never be made complex and difficult to understand just for the sake of being complex and difficult to understand. One thing that was particularly helpful was his line about how we should choose words for their meaning, and not just substitute phrases in haphazardly to fill the space. I think George Orwell is telling me to stop writing now, for I have written too many words.