Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Politics and the English Language Response

     Politics truly exploits the world of language a lot. Orwell makes a good point with his essay, politicians hide behind their confusing speeches with misused English and simply complex English. Society has come to embrace these allusions instead of demanding clarity everyone plays the game. We decipher their puzzles one word at a time.
     Orwell begins his essay with examples in paragraph three. He lists five passages that he believes have a large deal of "faults of [their] own" as he says. He proceeds to explain exactly What the problem is. He transfers to using categories in explaining the faults of his examples. The categories are as follows; dying metaphors, operators or verbal false limbs, pretentious diction and meaningless words. While dying metaphors are not commonly used among our current political populous meaningless words are at large. Politicians pack their speeches with not only meaningless words but also promises. By categorizing the different aspects of exploited language Orwell can truly highlight his points and the audience can clearly understand his point.
     Orwell describes in detail that often the phrases that are used in speeches are used incorrectly and people go on to continue to use them incorrectly starting a bad trend. Bad language is something that spreads and people adapt to understand of the years. However I am sure somewhere out there English teachers are shaking their heads.
     Last but not least Orwell concludes with a "rules [that] sound elementary"  but he also warns that "one could keep all of them and still write bad English." I found the slightest bit of irony that while Orwell's essay talks about hard to understand language the essay itself is not written in our time and was not always as clear as a recreation in 2012 would be.

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