Orwell on the English language
July 2nd, 2007
Yesterday someone pointed me towards an apparently famous short essay by George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, which he wrote in 1946. The essay is truly brilliant and I can highly recommend you all (well, if anyone reads this blog!) read it.
The most brilliant quote in the essay is the paraphrasing of this text from the Ecclesiastes:
“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
And Orwell’s paraphrase in modern English:
“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”
The latter sentence sounds like a quote directly from my thesis! So definitely something to work in …
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