Big Brother's First Impressions

My brain hurts? Does it really? No, but reading what Orwell had to say about the English language and his examples made me realize the we humans do indeed shape language for our own purposes. And that to this day we have made a multitude of bad habits, such as the staleness of imagery and the lack of precision, to the point people consider the English Language a bad thing. How could we have let this go on for so long? The key words HABIT and SHORTCUTS.

It has become habitual that people write, but end up not saying what they meant to say. As Orwell says "The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not." A writers prose and piece of work rather becomes something of many words that make no sense whatsoever. It explains why we are constantly going back to reread the passages over and over again until we finally understand what the writer had intended for us to get out of that reading. I can see why Orwell chooses to use those five passages to illustrate these habits. I could have kept going back to read and reread them, but I still would have never been able to comprehend anything. These passages certainty meant something as these are professors who have written these and some are published works, but I got nothing out of it. Nope, not even a clue what theses people were trying to say. And OMG, the humongous words that were used in these passages were also unbelievable. There was one passage in particular that had four words that I had to look up, and even so I still was not able to understand the aim. If anything, what I got out of what I have read thus far is a lot of vocabulary words. So what is the point then? Why try to speak your mind and have nobody end up not understanding a single word?

Another thing people like to do is use dying metaphors which have lost all vivid power, but are still used to keep people from inventing new phrases. In this way, people do not have to worry about having to generate something new, but rather use something already created..... LAZY BUMS. We are so use to having the answer already there for us that we no longer have to think. This therein fore creates a world of people who cannot think for themselves, and when they are put in a situation where they have to think they have nothing or at least they believe they don't. What also generates a problem is that phrases and words are used and used by many people who are not even knowledgeable of the phrase/word to begin with. As a result, you have writing out there that cannot be understood and everything loses its purpose. Orwell proposes that the necessary steps to reverse this process is to get rid of these habits by thinking more clearly, and to be "a writer who stopped to think what he was saying" in order to prevent alteration from the original phrase.

After reading to where I got, Orwell has gotten me thinking have I been over-complicating things? Have I become one of those people to use words and phrases I think sound good and intelligent when really it is making me sound like I'm just talking pure nonsense? Someone let me know! Can you understand me? Lesson learned, you would much rather be short and clear than have a full page of academic words and not heard. This perfectly illustrates quality over quantity concept. Peoples let's just try and be concise, straight to the point, and clear from now on.