Orwell - "Politics and the English Language"

I can see where Orwell is coming from. In the second paragraph, he decries the decline of a language as a vicious cycle because when people have foolish thoughts, “it [the language] becomes ugly and inaccurate,” but then this in turn makes it easier for people to go right back and have foolish thoughts because they may have read some of the “bad English” (as Orwell uses later in the paragraph) which caused them to think foolishly. It’s not really the reader’s fault; they were just reading some foolish words. That is what’s so powerful about a language. When reading, for example, certain words bring up certain thoughts in the reader. Therefore, the writer can somewhat control your thoughts by carefully picking and choosing the words he writes down. I like what Orwell says about verbs becoming phrases in modern English in the paragraph Operators or verbal false limbs. Many times, phrases like “gave rise to” aren’t really needed and make a sentence seem wordy, which actually hurts the writing. Instead, these phrases can be replaced with just one word like “initiated.” Orwell’s discussion about political language consisting “largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” made the point of his article clearer to me. It made me realize how the vagueness of modern language doesn’t do justice to what is actually meant. For example, Orwell says the political phrase elimination of unreliable elements refers to when, “People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps.” Someone who reads the phrase elimination of unreliable elements probably wouldn’t have thought that it meant people getting shot in the back of the neck. In the end, “the fight against bad English” should not solely be the concern of professional writers. Rather than just imitating what is heard, people should go through the trouble of thinking clearly and saying what they mean.