Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. The point is that the process is reversible. 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. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate.

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