George Owell – influential English novelist, takes his stance on how the English language has regressed. Orwell blames this largely on political and economic issues, in a cycle of bad decision making. Here we are presented with a list of passages, which the author has critiqued. Authors no longer have the ability to get their ideas across effectively; it is now a swamp of “vagueness and sheer incompetence”. Writing techniques which no longer have the same effect as they once had these include; Dying metaphors, Operators or Verbal False Limbs, Pretentious Diction and Meaningless words.  

          Use of metaphors have just been an excuse for authors to not come up with their own creative material, often they are out of place or not as relevant as they have been in the past. Operators or Verbal False Limbs are a way of beating around the bush, it makes the text seem more intellectual or politically correct when a simple more direct word would have sufficed. Similarly, this can also be seen with a pretentious diction.  Words like epic and virtually, try to make mundane events more interesting than they are in reality. Meaningless words are the use of words only for the sake of using them, this is a characteristic often used in art criticism and in politics, often if we have a word to summarize a concept even if we make not have an exact definition for that word.  In summary, writers are no longer concise; we use the long drawn out phrases of others and mash them together, this is simply because it is faster and easier but we are sacrificing on quality.

       Orwell is against politicians’ use of English; parties attack each other with “mechanically repeated phrases” and think they are above their audience and don’t want to hit them with the hard facts. Language can corrupt thought, you can get lost in the words and not realise the message. Orwell leaves us with some tips to improve our own writing; these include – avoiding figures of speech, short words are better than long ones, be conscience (cut words out), active writing is ideal and to avoid jargon.

     This was written by Orwell in 1946, many would agree that commonplace English has continued to change to this day. To relate this to CCIT, a new trend in the way of communication would include the use of textese. Texteses include shorthand – such as ‘u’ and acronyms like ‘WTF’.  I believe that Orwell would enjoy this form of communication because it is straight to the point, the shorthand lets information travel quickly and doesn’t leave any room to get lost in the words and it is all about getting the message across.

Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English language. Retrieved March 7^th 2012 from                         

https://portal.utoronto.ca/bbcswebdav/pid-3322554-dt-content-rid- 17730806_2/courses/Winter-2013-CCT110H5-S-LEC0101/George%20Orwell_%20Politics%20and%20the%20English%20Language.pdf