He then goes on to talk about political language. (Am I allowed to use that foreign word?). He then complains about the gumming together of long strips of words, much as Don Watson did sixty years later but with more elan. He uses the example of the ‘ ancien regime‘ as an example of pretentious diction, but among historians ‘ ancien regime‘ has a specific and accepted meaning. Certainly they can become stale, but they act as a form of short-hand, and not every one has the clarity and imagination to mint their own. Then there is (iii) ‘pretentious diction’ or the use of foreign words and jargon and (iv) meaningless words to hide the vacuity of ideas behind them. adding phrases like ‘serve the purposes of’ or adding syllables to a word like ‘deregionalize’).
He then goes on to lampoon five examples of writing, and identified four problems: (i)stale metaphors, (ii) ‘verbal false limbs’ (i.e. It starts very abruptly, and I felt as if I had walked in on a conversation that had already started. I must admit that I was rather disappointed in it. Many of its ideas have been rehashed (in, for example, Don Watson’s Death Sentence) and it’s hard now to come to it with fresh eyes. It was published in 1946 and it is only about 24 pages long. I’ve only just started attending the Ivanhoe Reading Circle after 122 years – of the Circle, not of me – and George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ seemed a rather brave choice for a reading group.
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