Orwell and the English Language

While a little bit of a difficult read, George Orwell’s piece made a valid point: writing today is not so much about the meaning as it is about the word choice, a concept that is completely absurd if you take the time to think it through.

I read 1984 in high school and while not one of my favorite novels, Orwell offered an interesting interpretation of the future, and in a lot of ways he was correct: surveillance, silent helicopters, and computers that act as telescreens do have places in our society. I remember discussing whether or not Orwell was a neurotic, suspicious person able to see only the darkest parts of technology. While I cannot recall the class consensus, I think the same question could be applied to his views of writing and the direction of the English language.

Writers today are famous for inserting five-dollar words in places where they do not belong and in ways that are usually obnoxiously obvious. They sacrifice clarity and effortless interpretation for overused phrases and unbearable clichés, choosing instead to appear as though they are in a class that a reader cannot understand. As someone who hopes to make a living as a writer, common sense dictates that insulting the reader is a very stupid thing to do.

The pieces Orwell chose to prove his argument were sufficient—they sounded like legal contracts and medical textbooks as opposed to a letter in the Tribune. Of course you do not want to talk down to the reader by insulting his or her intelligence, but the writing will have the same effect if the author tries to sound smarter than he or she is by throwing in ten-letters words that do not belong. Orwell believes that a writer can still make a point without using unnecessarily big words, that readers will relate more to someone that is writing in the form of a conversation as opposed to someone writing to prove his or her intelligence.

Finding success as a writer is becoming increasingly difficult, and it is important to always write with a purpose. What is the point of throwing in big words and complex sentences if all clarity disappears? Writers that we revere today, whether it be Shakespeare or Hemingway or Tolstoy or Austen, produced prose that was engaging and filled with imagery, but did so using phrases and words that could be understood by all literate levels of the population. Obviously all had their own styles, Shakespeare’s perhaps the most unique, but they were faithful to their audiences and their own intelligence because it wasn’t about impressing the audience with their knowledge. For them it was about telling a story, and that is what is missing from writing in our society.

Was Orwell a neurotic, suspicious person? Perhaps he was, but you cannot deny that he was right. This piece was published in 1946, the beginning of the decline of the English language, and what Orwell predicted essentially came true: insincerity has severely damaged our society’s ability to produce valuable writing, with foolish prose encouraging foolish thoughts. Meaning has been sacrificed in the name of proving one’s worth and intelligence, and the solution to the problem is understanding that in this situation, less pretention is more power.