{"id":1438,"date":"2026-05-09T18:47:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T09:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/?p=1438"},"modified":"2026-05-09T18:55:03","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T09:55:03","slug":"politics-and-the-english-language-george-orwell-1946","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/?p=1438","title":{"rendered":"Politics and the English Language (George Orwell, 1946)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don\u2019t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but <span style=\"color: Red;\"><strong>one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end<\/strong><\/span>. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.<br \/>\n<span style=\"color: Red;\"><strong>Political language<\/strong><\/span>\u2014and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists\u2014<span style=\"color: Red;\"><strong>is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind<\/strong><\/span>. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one\u2019s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase\u2014some jackboot, Achilles\u2019 heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse\u2014into the dustbin where it belongs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expres [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1438"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1442,"href":"http:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions\/1442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shinichikushima.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}