Orwell's views on words.

From what I understood from the reading Orwell was saying that it's because of political vagueness and English is on the decline. While I can see where he's coming from I think schools are important to bring up here too. Orwell brought up how we use pretentious diction and cliches in most of our writing. That is almost what all papers in high school need. At the end of the reading Orwell had his list of rules that he wanted us to follow to be better writings and thinkers. While I was reading the list I definitely agreed with him, but it went against everything I learned in high school. For example #2 was, "Never use a long word where a short one will do." as we talked about in class one day we use the longer words to have fake smartness. In my experience that's exactly what teachers wanted to see. They wanted to feel like they taught us something without actually doing anything. Also, the examples that Orwell used confused me and I had to read it again before I was able to even get any sort of understanding for what I read. When Orwell used the example of the teacher that agreed with the Soviet point of view but couldn't come right out and say it so he used circular language to make it as vague as possible makes me feel like we make English as vague as possible just for this reason. We're too scared to admit what our true opinion is so we use language that's been used by so many other people that it just becomes meaningless.

What I got from Orwell's reading was we talk and write because we can, but there's rarely any actual substance with what's said.