“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer (Orwell, 5).” This quote from the reading made the biggest impact on me. I completely agree with it and think it applies to this century. As our government gains more power the impact it has on our lives increases. It even impacts our language as Orwell states! With big issues that need to be faced, the English language is pushed aside. This is causing a collapse in language. For example, a history teacher may overlook errors in a student’s paper as long as they understood the concepts of the class. The teacher’s main goal is for the students to learn the class material designated by the board of education, established by the government. Their grammatical and spelling errors are overlooked in order to achieve another goal. It is easy to push aside English because wither it is proper or not, the main goal of communicating can be done both ways.
Another issue in the paper I’d like to address is Orwell’s six rules. As I look back at the paper’s I have written, I’ve noticed I make many of the mistakes he says not to. This leads me to believe that the collapse of language has only decreases since 1946. Being a student I take many classes where the teachers require research papers with a certain number of words. This leads students, like me, to add in words that are unnecessary and add long words to make the paper sound professional. Orwell didn’t include this as a reason in his paper but it could be included under the government having an impact on our language.
I think that you made a good point about teachers overlooking grammatical errors in order to achieve another goal within the paper. I think that people get used to this treatment sometimes and it comes across in their other work. Interesting idea!
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