WEEk EigHT! AWesoME WEll's!!
Well this week begins our look at "Politics and the English Language" by Orwell alas Eric Arthur Blair. I found this essay by Well’s very inspiring and agree with MG that it should be part of the English curriculum in the later part of high school where the student is able to understand and appreciate what G.O. was heading towards and help in their own writing and understanding. Though I may not agree with all the six rules there is a lot to ponder. Words and the poet give life to anything as paint and an artist does to a picture and sometimes one must use a more complicated word to describe what one is feeling and that ‘simple’ word just won’t resonate what one wants to convey. So don’t give up on the more ‘pregnate’ words just yet but make what you are trying to say smooth and uncomplicated. Maybe some professionals should be given these rules before they start practising!
The six rules being:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
One’s work should be one’s own and he/she should be able to express their ideas as one wants and not have predetermined factors of what one must believe, think or write!!
Orwell comments:
"The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. "
The six rules being:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
One’s work should be one’s own and he/she should be able to express their ideas as one wants and not have predetermined factors of what one must believe, think or write!!
Orwell comments:
"The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. "