Language In George Orwell's Politics And The English Language

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“Political languages --- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists --- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” (Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 167) George Orwell believed that the decline of a language must have political, economic and moral causes, and such deterioration will ultimately lead to the further corruption of thoughts. The spread and invasion of the abused languages, especially when prompted by political manipulation, can result in political conformity destructive to the people, the country and the truth. In Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language, he pointed out how he found the political trends in his time made the usage of pretentious, obscure and insincere language popular and how such trends facilitated the concealment of truth. For example, as Orwell exemplified sarcastically in this essay, when “people are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps,” …show more content…

He focus on a particular type of abused language, the “ready-made phrases” (Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 168), the phrases that will come into your mind and construct sentences devoid of meaning for you. When he received a political pamphlet from someone, hoping to see an elaboration of ideas and opinions, was struck by “the invasion of one’s mind” of empty and pretentious phrases. He worried that, when people begin to rely on asking the words to construct the thoughts for them, no one will no longer be capable of efficient self-expression and ultimately, thinking. Orwell created a world in 1984 to show his idea that the control of language leads to the deprivation of intellectual thoughts, and this makes a complete manipulation of people

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