tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4167585665865020265.post1233570080631133466..comments2024-03-27T08:31:44.348+01:00Comments on Random Idea English: More random thoughts on examples of the passiveWarsaw Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15373568589613033674noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4167585665865020265.post-14576428555729579122013-08-31T11:29:42.019+02:002013-08-31T11:29:42.019+02:00Sorry, I missed out the link to the post about web...Sorry, I missed out the link to the <a href="http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2013/04/finding-collocations-and-language-in.html" rel="nofollow">post</a> about web collocation finders.Warsaw Willhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15373568589613033674noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4167585665865020265.post-38918233784792994112013-08-31T11:28:13.309+02:002013-08-31T11:28:13.309+02:00Thanks for the comment, Mura. I had a quick look a...Thanks for the comment, Mura. I had a quick look at your blog, and as a result, I’ve added Word and Phrase Info to my list of collocation-finding tools. Thanks for that. I recently wrote a <a href="http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2013/04/finding-collocations-and-language-in.html" rel="nofollow"></a>about these.<br /><br />Apropos Orwell, while I agree that much of his essay is concerned with mainly political language, the beginning and ending seem to me to be about non-literary language in general.<br /><br />He starts off by saying that the English language is ‘in a bad way’, and thinks that ‘the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes’. He then gives five examples of the sort of writing he is criticising, the first three of which have nothing to do with politics. And when he details the types of language he doesn’t like, much of his criticism is directed at what he sees as the meaningless or the pretentiousness of the words themselves rather than their political use. What is true is that he sees political writing as providing particularly bad examples of this.<br /><br />Orwell introduces the last section with the famous six rules by talking about ‘the defence of the English language’ and he later says that he is talking about ‘language as an instrument for expressing and not concealing or preventing thought’, which I would take to be much wider than just the language of politics. Mind you, he did write in another essay, ‘Why I write‘, that all his own writing from 1936 on had been against totalitarianism, so perhaps he saw political writing in a rather wider vein.<br /><br />What’s more, I think this way of thinking gels with what he wrote about language in his Listener articles and BBC talks. (What the writer of the article you refer to seems to forget is that Orwell was himself a journalist). And I think Orwell was concerned to put these rules into use in his last two novels, Animal Farm and 1984, where the language is much simpler than in his previous work.<br /><br />As far his last, and perhaps most important, rule, I’ve always understood that by ‘barbarous’, he simply meant ‘ugly’, especially as he earlier refers to ‘avoidable ugliness’ in the passages he quotes.Warsaw Willhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15373568589613033674noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4167585665865020265.post-87076344338886614582013-08-26T01:02:56.632+02:002013-08-26T01:02:56.632+02:00hi,
another great post on passives cheers :)
goi...hi,<br /><br />another great post on passives cheers :)<br /><br />going a bit offtopic regarding the Orwell essay, i agree with this view (http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/715-eyes-like-blank-discs-the-guardian-s-steven-poole-on-george-orwell-s-politics-and-the-english-language.html) that the essay was not about how to write in general but political writing that tends to promote violence e.g. the last rule 6 -<br />"Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."<br /><br />ta<br />muraAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com