Politics & the English Langauge by George Orwell Summary

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Tendai Mkandawire Mkandawire 1 Professor Logan English 300 Online 29 September 2012 Politics and The English language by George Orwell In his essay called 'Politics and The English language', Orwell states the current state of the modern english and its causes as well as it's consequences. He states that english prose, more in depth political writings are characterized by 'vagueness and 'incompetence'. He reiterates metaphors and how they have lost a whole lot of meaning, but this is because they help the author for creating phrases themselves. Metaphors, in Orwell's opinion makes the author uninterested and makes it hard for the author to understand exactly what the author is trying to convey. Orwell proposes the idea that political writing consists of long passages where metaphors and unnecessary vocabulary is being used without even knowing their meanings and gives the passage no meaning at all. Modern prose has lost it's meaning overtime. Instead of "foolish thoughts", language itself has become a result of "foolish thoughts". He offers his opinion and goes on to say that vagueness is the most evident characteristic of the english prose. The lack of precision is also a problem because the writer cannot express it, or he is trying to say something else that has no meaning at all. Meaningless words are also a problem. Words like romantic, plastic, values and so on are meaningless because they do not point any discoverable object but hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. Words such as fascism and democracy have no agreed definition and are used in a dishonest way because the authors have their own
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