The limits of language

Can there be a political writer who has not fallen in love with George Orwell's 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language"? Part of its appeal is what's appealing about all of Orwell -- its directness and honesty, its plain-spokenness, its faith, against all evidence, that human affairs can be conducted morally, its sense of being on the side of ordinary people, not of the sophisticated and powerful. The only people Orwell attacks by name in "Politics and the English Language" are two celebrated academics, Harold Laski and Lancelot Hogben, not the kind of minor-grade politicians and bureaucrats who would have made easy targets.

By Nicholas Lemann

November 4, 2007