Orwell was a great writer, but he didn't know much about language. Which wasn't really his fault, the field of linguistics was not very well known in the 40s.

For instance

Quote:
But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

To me this looks like linguistic determinism. There just isn't evidence that language shapes thought to such an extreme extent.

Quote:
Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

This is the etymological fallacy. The origin of a word or phrase is irrelevant to how it is currently used.

Quote:
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

All language is spread by tradition and imitation. This is how language works. If it was possible that normal language use led to corruption, then why wasn't language corrupted hundreds or thousands of years ago?

Quote:
In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active

I assume this is a joke: using the passive in the very sentence where he's talking about how the passive is overused. But Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage notes

Quote:
Bryant 1962 reports three statistical studies of passive versus active sentences in various periodicals; the highest incidence of passive constructions was 13 percent. Orwell runs to a little over 20 percent in "Politics and the English Language."

Orwell's essay, where he warns us not to use the passive voice, has more passive clauses than any periodical. What that intentional?

Last edited by goofy; 11/19/11 04:35 PM.