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A New Year of Blog Posts

 If you have come across this blog, please know first that I appreciate anyone who gives of their time to read my writing. Please know also that this is my fourth blog. I lost access to two others, https://highereducationobserver.blogspot.com/ and https://partsofspeaking.blogspot.com/ and I post entries to my website, www.barbaragrahamtucker.net. 

I have committed to posting daily, within reason and possibility, in 2025. Some of those will just be like today's:  a  link to something worth reading.  Other times I will write my own essays or collected observations. And sometimes posts will be of poems I enjoy and find valuable, or art. But this will be my extension, my reaching out. 

Today's post is a link to an essay that every who writes--for enjoyment, for political involvement, for work, or art--needs to read and take in like nourishment and health.  (I almost wrote "internalize," but George Orwell would not like a word with an "-ize" ending.  

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

This famous essay is not just one for a casual reading. It should guide us who write every day, especially its emphasis on concrete, real-world metaphors and images. However, I would like to quote the basis of his essay:

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.  


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