Assignment week #6- Kemara Gopeesingh

Orwell is saying that politics and economics have a cause an effect relationship with modern english. Orwell is implying that, because of the abundant amount of issues occuring globally, we write about that instead of our own ideas, in which we lack originality. Orwell says “It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Relating back to what I said I said earlier about how because of the abundant amount of issues occuring globally, we write about that instead of our own ideas, in which we lack originality, its because of everyone hearing and reading about the same thing, that everybody is thinking like been there done that. We saw this specifically during the presidential debate, because everybody had an idea already of the kind of answers Trump was going to give from his press conferences. However, One quote that really stood out to me was. “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.” In this quote Orwell is blatantly saying that modern writing an exaggeration of what someone is actually trying to say, or what actually happened, which is what the writing techniques of metaphors and imagery imposes. This is extremely relatable for when we have to write professional emails, whether it be to your boss, teacher, etc, because when we type out what we have to say, we proofread it over to make sure everything makes sense, and for it to not come off in the wrong way. One of the categories of language use that most disturb Orwell is meaningless words. When writers use “meaningless words,” they use it to make a comparison according to Orwell. I read a book called Nickeled and Dimed, where a comparison was made between people who work for minimum wage versus people who don’t have to struggle to work and pay off their bills. However, seeing other writers do this, I would say that I have used this type of language in my writing but haven’t noticed it until now. In relation to politics and language, I would say that gender neutral bathrooms versus gender bathrooms have been the subject of debate for years now. Some people believe that whatever gender someone was born with is what they should stick with for the rest of their life, where as other people accept the fact that not many people are happy with their gender at birth and grow out of it at some point in their life. Therefore, the state of California became the first state in 2017 to make single- occupancy bathrooms gender neutral.