George Orwell

Orwell’s essays on language and power are foundational for any account of how vague, abstract, or euphemistic prose enables political abuse. His novels dramatize the same argument at scale.

¶Core ideas

• Politics and the English Language: bad prose and bad politics share a structure of evasion
• Newspeak: language engineered to make heretical thought literally unsayable
• Plain style as political stance: concrete, short, Anglo-Saxon words resist totalitarian abstraction

¶Key works

• Politics and the English Language (1946)
• 1984 (1949)
• Animal Farm (1945)