I should have encountered Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" at some point in my literary education.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing, is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.
Sixty-three years later, the piece remains remarkably relevant; in fact, the situation now may be worse than in Orwell's time. MBAs today are like soldiers armed with assembly-line English—they are highly-trained buzzword specialists. I don't think any amount of journalistic jeering can change this.
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