George Orwell
British novelist and essayist
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
By the year 2050 — earlier probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of The Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, 1984, 1949
Posted on December 20, 2005 at 8:36 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition — in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, Why I Write, 1946
Posted on April 21, 2000 at 9:04 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
I think that the deliberate invention of words is at least worth thinking over.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, New Words, 1940
Posted on December 2, 1999 at 7:33 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc [English Socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten , a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, 1984, 1949
Posted on October 24, 2000 at 10:49 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, Politics and the English Language
Posted on January 4, 2001 at 8:24 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, Inside the Whale, 1940
Posted on October 11, 2002 at 7:52 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, 1984
Posted on March 20, 2003 at 9:53 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, Shooting an Elephant
Posted on February 3, 2003 at 8:21 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, The English People
Posted on January 23, 2003 at 9:10 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, Confessions of a Book Reviewer
Posted on July 24, 2001 at 10:59 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, The English People
Posted on February 12, 2001 at 11:47 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, Politics and the English Language
Posted on March 6, 2002 at 7:02 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, Politics and the English Language
Posted on February 25, 2002 at 2:47 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The defence of the English language...has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a 'standard English' which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, Politics and the English Language
Posted on March 18, 2002 at 4:04 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
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.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, Politics and the English Language
Posted on March 21, 2002 at 11:42 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
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 squirting out ink.
—George Orwell, British novelist and essayist, Politics and the English Language
Posted on February 26, 2002 at 5:11 PM
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