Orwell

People who know me know (hopefully) that I try not to be a pretentious person, and that I have no time for material or monetary measures of a person's worth. My car, my clothes, and my diet attest to this. But there is one area in which I am something of a snob.

I'm a snob when it comes to writing, in the sense that I use big and rare words to convey my thoughts rather than the far more conventional recourse to monosyllabic tripe and CAPITAL letters (if you didn't understand me the first time, LET ME YELL!)

I have been and remain inspired to appreciate language because of George Orwell, among others of course. I consider Orwell to have been the greatest English-language writer of the 20th century. His best writings, I have found, are not "1984" or "Animal Farm", but rather his nonfiction and journalism.

At any rate, I ran across this quote by Orwell today that sums up my attitude in this regard far more succinctly than I ever could. And keep in mind that this was written in 1946:

"A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. 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."