Modern day America is flooded with advertisements everywhere. I remember in grade school, I would take the bus home, which was covered in advertisements to help cut costs for the school bus company. These ads often took average products and made them seem like the world’s best invention. George Orwell’s writing Politics and the English Language hits on this topic many times, and how humans are manipulating our language to its eventual decline.
This idea is relevant in marketing methods used by almost every major company. Daily, we are exposed to ads without even knowing it. Looking at my notebook for class I see “Staples Super Strong ACCEL Durable Cover”. This is a clear advertisement that Staples notebooks are far superior to another, and apparently it worked on me. This is what Orwell described as “gumming together words that someone had already set forward and making the results presentable by sheer humbug”. This notebook is no different to any other notebook, however it effectively led me to spend the extra dollar on a “Super Strong” notebook. How by any means a notebook could be strong, I’m not …show more content…
Lines such as “Define your brows, express yourself” and “Voluminous Butterfly Mascara”. First of all, who on earth defines themselves by their eyebrows? This is an over glorified miniature hair brush for your eyebrows and yet somehow people believe that this will allow them to express themselves. Regardless, L’Oréal chooses to use words such a “Voluminous”, “Infallible” and “Expertise”. This is a clear example of Orwell’s second rules, “Never use a long word where a short one will do”. However, even though this is considered terrible writing, it works. L’Oréal reported a revenue of 25.257 billion dollars, and sold over 200 million products. Therefore, this marketing clearly works and shows that Orwell was right in his prediction of the fall of the English
This idea is relevant in marketing methods used by almost every major company. Daily, we are exposed to ads without even knowing it. Looking at my notebook for class I see “Staples Super Strong ACCEL Durable Cover”. This is a clear advertisement that Staples notebooks are far superior to another, and apparently it worked on me. This is what Orwell described as “gumming together words that someone had already set forward and making the results presentable by sheer humbug”. This notebook is no different to any other notebook, however it effectively led me to spend the extra dollar on a “Super Strong” notebook. How by any means a notebook could be strong, I’m not …show more content…
Lines such as “Define your brows, express yourself” and “Voluminous Butterfly Mascara”. First of all, who on earth defines themselves by their eyebrows? This is an over glorified miniature hair brush for your eyebrows and yet somehow people believe that this will allow them to express themselves. Regardless, L’Oréal chooses to use words such a “Voluminous”, “Infallible” and “Expertise”. This is a clear example of Orwell’s second rules, “Never use a long word where a short one will do”. However, even though this is considered terrible writing, it works. L’Oréal reported a revenue of 25.257 billion dollars, and sold over 200 million products. Therefore, this marketing clearly works and shows that Orwell was right in his prediction of the fall of the English