Editorial from A Newspaper

Editorial from a Newspaper

In his essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell contends that the English language is decaying but that this decay should not be considered inevitable. He lists several "tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged" [682] and argues that much more than a matter of linguistic aesthetics alone, these tricks are symptomatic of--and help lead to additional--problems of sloppy and politically dangerous thinking. Using Orwell's criteria to analyze contemporary prose, it becomes immediately clear that since his essay's publication in 1946, thinking and writing have continued to ...