The Unoriginality of Orwell’s Critique of Language

I had always imagined that the ideas Orwell so tediously overstates and disingenuously defends in his megafamous 1946 essay“Politics and the English Language” (henceforth P&EL), though impractical and dishonest, were original with him. But I discovered by accident recently that they aren’t.

The best-known theme of P&EL concerns how long words encourage intellectual laziness, cloaking thought in airy abstraction and lending a polysyllabic patina of respectability to obnoxious political and legal ...