121024-george-orwell   Orwell day was January 21st, and of course, I missed it.  Media Lens did not miss the boat and has an article up laced with the sort of irony and breathtaking self-deception that Orwell fought against.

“January 21, ‘Orwell Day’, marked the 63rd anniversary of George Orwell’s death, Steven Poole notes in the Guardian. To commemorate 110 years since Orwell was born (June 25), BBC radio will broadcast a series about his life while Penguin will publish a new edition of his essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’. This essay, Poole comments, is Orwell’s ‘most famous shorter work, and probably the most wildly overrated of any of his writings’.

Why ‘wildly overrated’?

‘Much of it is the kind of nonsense screed against linguistic pet hates that anyone today might compose in a green-text email to the newspapers.’

The essay’s ‘assault on political euphemism’, it seems, ‘is righteous but limited’, while its more general attacks ‘on what he perceives to be bad style are often outright ridiculous, parading a comically arbitrary collection of intolerances’.

This is strong stuff indeed. Was one of Orwell’s most highly-regarded essays really about venting ‘linguistic pet hates’? The answer is in the essay. Orwell noted that the writing he admired was generally provided by ‘some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line”. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style’.

As for the mainstream productions of his day – the ‘pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos’:

‘one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them’.

This typically dramatic and disturbing passage makes clear that Orwell was not focusing on ‘linguistic pet hates’. Rather, he was motivated to resist a process of social dehumanisation facilitated by ‘imitative’ and ‘lifeless’ communication, by a toxic ‘orthodoxy’. He underlined his reasoning:

‘I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.’

If this was a crucial issue in Orwell’s time, it is even more so today.”

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Follow the link and read the rest of the article.  If it doesn’t inspire you to triangulate your news reading, I’m not sure what will.