Politics and the English Language Analysis
“Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder . “ This passage is written by Professor Lancelot Hogben(located on pg. __ _, the second example) This is shown as a prime example of bad writing habits which are identified in George Orwell’s essay. This passage shows examples of dead metaphors, the problems with putting implicit words that confuse the reader, and the sheer unwillingness to look up proper meanings of certain words such as egregious.
As you can see our presentation is about the essay “Politics and the English Language”. This essay classifies the bad writing habits in modern English as opposed to the traditional style. We would first like to start off with a quiz to check the class’s general knowledge of the classesIf you could not identify any examples of slang and bad writing habits it would be smart to listen to what were going to talk about. George Orwell writes about the traditional style of English, and the connection between language and action.
Orwell discusses the problems of Modern English and the slow spread of vagueness in writing. In this essay the thesis was explicit; it stated that the English language is in a decline and that modern English of full of bad writing habits which are spread by imitation. In this paper Orwell identifies different errors that writers generally make as his subtopics such as dying metaphors, operator or verbal false limbs, pretentious diction and meaningless words. The first sub-topic talks about dead metaphors.
The method of development for this sub-topic is cause and effect. Dead metaphors show that writers are becoming lazy with metaphors; they use old pre-made metaphors so they don’t have to invent new ones. This causes writers to use metaphors in the wrong context and never have a chance to express their own imagery. Also these metaphors are not precise enough and produce vagueness in the written work which shows the writer might not be interested in what he is writing. Now the second sub topic is about operators or verbal false limbs.
The method of development for this paragraph is cause. Operators and verbal false limbs show that writers are using words for filler in order to make the sentence balance with no thought about meaning and they. This means that the passive is always being used instead of the active which is wrong. The third subtopic is about pretentious diction. The method of development for this paragraph is cause and effect. Pretentious diction occurs when writers are using words that have no strong purpose.
They are interchangeable and have no strong tone. A good example of pretentious diction is Marxist writing. Marxist writing is when words are improperly derived from German, Russian, or French. The fourth and final subtopic in this paper is meaningless words. The method of development for this paper is effect. Meaningless words are when writers using larger words with more syllables in their text, but are more unclear than their more simple words they are replacing. So now were going to go on about the tone in this essay.
The tones expressed in this essay were feelings of assertiveness and bitterness. Orwell was self assured that what he was writing was true in our society and was bitter about the downfall of the English language. In this essay we found three examples of negative connotative diction. The first example of negative connotative diction was found when Orwell stated in paragraph four which states that “Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them.
The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. ” In this passage he chooses to use the word “Staleness” to show the negativity. The second Example of negative connotative diction comes from paragraph five where its written that “But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. In this case Orwell decides to use the word dump instead of “amount” or another word of positive diction. The third example of negative connotative diction is also found again in paragraph 5 when Orwell states “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. ” In this case Orwell decides to use perverting to show his disgust for what the writer is doing when he is demonstrating an example of a dead metaphor.
In this essay we found two good examples of figurative images. The first figurative image can be found on pg. 348, where it says “It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to airplanes. ” This image is a simile working with the subject of the struggle against abuse of language. This is a figurative image because it makes an abstract comparison of language to preferring candles to electric light.
The second figurative image we found was on pg 355, where it says “In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. ” This is also a simile working with the subject of stale phrases. This is a figurative image because it makes this image with tea leaves blocking a sink, and in real life there is no correlation between tea leaves and choking. .
