George Orwell- "Politics and the English Language" Summary

In his essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell comments on the current state of modern English, both its causes and its possible consequences. Orwell states that English prose, particularly political writings, are characterized by vagueness and incompetence. He believes that these things stem from a growing reliance on metaphors which have lost all meaning, and which are only used because they save the author the trouble of creating phrases for themselves. The use of such metaphors indicates that the author is either not interested in or does not know what he is saying, this makes it difficult for the reader to be interested in the text or to be able to comprehend its meaning. Many words, like fascism and democracy, have no agreed definition and are used in a dishonest way because authors that have their own definitions will use them knowing that readers will see them and think something else. The biggest problem with modern prose is that it has lost its meaning. Authors no longer think of a concrete object and choose words to describe it, they allow stale metaphors and words to choose their meanings for them. Political writings are often the worst, the contain so many euphemisms and have so much vagueness that the listener has no chance of discover the speaker’s aims. Orwell believed that the best fix for the downfall of the English language was for each individual to be on guard against ready-made words and phrases, choosing instead to use the simplest words possible to get one’s meaning across.