Rhetorical Analysis Of 1984 By George Orwell

After reading this essay, it is easy to see how passionate George Orwell is about the English language, even when he becomes frustrated with it. He ties language to most everything in life, concluding that not only do we influence language, but language influences us. This phenomenon has shaped everything from how we view history, to how we speak about politics. Although he sees this relationship as positive, Orwell’s main frustration is that as a society we have fallen into routines that over time have lessened the meaning of our words. This, in turn, has contributed to the overall decline of an intelligent society. One pattern that Orwell cites as damaging is that “worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves” (). Although writes may see these phrases as descriptive and helpful, the overuse creates confusion and dilutes the actual meaning of the metaphorical phrase. Orwell …show more content…
As a society, we continue to choose words that essentially hold no substance. Orwell believes that as a direct repercussion, our society is on a downward spiral. In his famous work, 1984, he illustrates this by creating the dialect of Newspeak. Newspeak is a government initiative to limit the amount of ‘negative though words’ in their citizens vocabulary. Any word in Newspeak can serve as a different part of speech. Allowing citizens to combine words and phrases to create multiple meanings. Although English was the national language before, Newspeak is not directly translated from English. Meaning in the generations after Newspeak is fully adopted into their society, no one will be able to understand documents from centuries before. By creating this dialect, Orwell draws direct comparisons to our decline in language. Newspeak is branded as easier to understand, but with its ability to be malleable it creates no