filamentosmovimentos

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. "
(...)
"This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed"
(...)
"the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active..."
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"What is above all needed is to let meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.
In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them."




in "Politics and The English Language" by George Orwell
Penguin Books, 1945, 2013