Five Failures?
In “Politics and the English Language” (Horizon, 1946), George Orwell wrote:
Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written. These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad—I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen—but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer.
Over the past year John P Lethbridge has been providing background articles on the five authors quoted by Orwell. Here is an index to his work.
‘(1) I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley…
‘(2) Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms…
‘(3) On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream.
‘(4) All the “best people” from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains…
‘(5) If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled…
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Great work, John
Thanks Quentin