George Orwell's Lies

Journalists love George Orwell as if he’s Sergeant Pepper: everybody who has read “Politics and the English Language” wanted to become a writer. Orwell made his hatred of imprecision, euphemisms, and stock phrases the basis of the war against the wrongs of the world—and the Fascists. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink,” he wrote in the essay, a manifesto, manual, and propaganda pamphlet all rolled into one. “I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”