Opinion | What George Orwell Can Teach Us About Power and Language Today - The New York... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ell-language-antisemitism.html
orwell language corruption debasement culture history
shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 24
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“The word Fascism,” he writes, “has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
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He adds other exhausted words, including democracy, freedom and patriotic — convenient terms for establishing righteousness, easily melting into self-righteousness.
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The writer is George Orwell, in his celebrated 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell contended that language had become corrupt and debased in his time, but the survival of his examples into the present contradicts him, suggesting that not only the problem but the very examples may be timeless.
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I showed that passage to an intelligent, well-educated person much younger than I am. He understood Orwell’s intention, but he confessed that he found the parody, with its colorless polysyllables, easier to understand — he might have said “more accessible” — than the plain words of the original. It felt better to him than the original.
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Dilution of meaning is familiar in a way that can make us feel comfortable, or even worse, comfortably righteous
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The reliably available terms of disapproval and approval, genocide and patriotism, antisemitism and democracy, convey large scale and importance, but sometimes while avoiding the heavy cost of paying actual attention.
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The more important the word, the more its meaning may be a matter of degree, from not much to quite a lot. The attainment of meaning requires work. The more important the meaning, the harder the work.