Slow blogging here as we gear up some new projects for the new year at Salon.
For a side project I have just re-read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” I used to read this once a year or more but have fallen out of the habit. Take ten minutes out of your week to read it if you haven’t lately. In the era of Iraq war cant it provides a good bucket of cold water to the face.
If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — 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. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs. |
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