George Orwell

I having completed 6 nights playing in the pit of a musical I have had plenty of reading time. Besides the paper from my new subscription, I've also memorized 100 Japanese Kanji, reviewed the 96 Hiragana & Katakana characters, and most interestingly read George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language.

He states that ugly and inaccurate language is both a cause and effect of dishonest politics and also poor thinking. Having abused English for so long (and starting to abuse Japanese), his thoughts hit home. I often find myself using strings of words that sound good, but are quite vague and meaningless -In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that, instead of I think.

Here is a juicy bit (emphasis added):

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible...Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification... People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck...: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.