form and folly
We have all seen it; as well we are all guilty of it. The crime I talk about is not one of any grave importance to the majority of us. However, it is a crime punishable by an even more horrific penalty than death. The penalty: being branded ignorant. The crime: bad grammar, or worse yet bad sentence structure. I myself am guilty of the most insulting atrocity in the “bad grammar book,” the dreaded I as part of a formal essay, it is as one might say my Achilles’ heal. I guess I shouldn’t complain. We are all programmed from the grade we first learn the alphabet to learn and follow the “simple” rules of English. Nonetheless I have never taken kindly to being told how to write. In his essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell describes the decline of the English language. Conveniently he also explains to everyone who reads his essay, how to write. That is if they want to write without “making nonsense of the whole passage” (27). He attributes the majority of the decline to four major topics. The topics are dying metaphors, operators or verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and last but not least meaningless words. He further suggests that the major contribution factor to the use of th
At first glance this may not seem like the most obvious choice for meaningless words, but now go back and reread the passage, replacing the words “Iraq” with “America”, and the “United States” with “the middle east.” Truth be told you could pick any county and let it take the place of Iraq in that passage and it would still fit as though Bush was talking directly about that country. As Orwell states pretentious diction is “used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, […] that aims at glorifying war” (24). This is exactly what the paragraph above is doing. Bush is making an attempt at glorifying American intervention into what he perceives as a “threat to peace.” On further examination, one would note, every paragraph after has included in it one form of pretentious diction or another. Whether it be “[dressing] up simple statements [to] give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments” (BR, 24), as the case is in the quote: e above topics is politics. This essay will examine the use of language in a political speech by President George w. Bush on the topic of the threat of Iraq. It will accomplish this by looking at the different topics Orwell stated that are responsible for the decline of the English language included this speech. “First, some ask why Iraq is different from other countries or regimes that also have terrible weapons. While there are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone -- because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people. This same tyrant has tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States” (Bush, par.7).
Some topics in this essay:
States” Bush,
George Bush,
Saddam Hussein,
,
George Orwell,
Abraham Lincon,
Middle East,
English Nonetheless,
pretentious diction,
english language,
meaningless words,
Broadview Press,
Threat” Cincinnati,
decline english language,
decline english,
dying metaphors,
orwell describes,
political speech,
looked view,
george bush,
i’m aware,
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Approximate Word count = 1302
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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