ORWELL...and SUGATA MARJIT...and #hokkolorob Reading Sugata Marjits views on the student movement reminds me of Orwells view that most political writings reek of insincerity and sheer cloudiness in their language because the very intent and purpose of the author is itself clouded by bigotry and intellectual stoogery. In 1968, in a now famous essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug...In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech...If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 20:35:08 +0000
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