Orwell's Gripe Commenting on and criticizing literature is a common practice. Indeed there are entire books, classes and even careers dedicated to this very purpose. To criticize language, particularly the contemporary lexicon, however, is a more risky endeavor. George Orwell has dared to do exactly this in his essay "Politics and the English Language". More surprising than the fact that Orwell took ... "abuse of language" as a struggle. A genuine concern for language and even society is evident. We've encountered such concerns already; studying the likes of Alexander Pope and Matthew Arnold...

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• Grade Level: High School

... in fact the collective effort of over one hundred French thinkers. The central purpose of the work was to secularize learning and, above all other things, to refute what the authors felt were dangerous carry-overs from the Middle Ages. For the Encyclopedists, human improvement was not a religious issue, but simply a matter of mastering the natural world through science and technology ... man into a soulless, thinking machine -- a robot. In a comment typical of the Romantic thrust, William Hazlitt asked, "For the better part of my life all I did was think." And William Godwin a contempor...

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