Politics and the English Language-Matthew Curtis' Reading Response

What a read this was! As I read it, I thought to myself what George Orwell would think of the way the English language is used these days. The "text speak" that so many people use has infiltrated into daily use, not only in writing but also in the way we actually speak. The text talk of today is quite the opposite of the passages that George Orwell quoted in his writing. It seemed to him that bad language was accomplished by using big words that make the passage more confusing than it is, as well as using certain words or phrases that made it seem that the writer had no actual knowledge of what they were writing about. I particularly liked his views on the word "democracy", in which he states "...not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides." In reading this section it again made me think of the modern times that we're in and the use of the word "democracy" when referring to countries that the western world has interests in. Orwell himself states in this writing that "It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it." I was amazed at how his depictions of politicians speaking publicly seemed to be the same as it is today. When he wrote “When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the same familiar phrases…one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being, but some kind of dummy.” It made me think of the arguments that George Bush and Tony Blair made in going to war in Iraq and how eerily similar it was to Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and British PM David Cameron speaking about all the reasons the United Nations should support military action in Libya. The same lines repeated about “defeating tyranny” and stopping mad men from killing their own people. It made me wonder if there’s a special book that has been written just for people in power to use in times of crisis that has key phrases in it that they use. It also resonates back to Orwell’s time when the world was at work fighting the Nazi’s and then shortly after that, Communism. I was confused at some parts, I admit, especially when he refers to words as being “Latin”, as in the following passage:

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.

As someone who is not an English major and doesn’t have quite the grasp on word roots as Orwell does, I found some of his arguments to be pretty confusing to the point that I wasn’t sure if I should agree or disagree with him. Overall it was an interesting essay to read, but I think I walked away from it more confused about the English language than I already had been.