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"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks."

Interestingly enough, George Orwell argues that the concept behind this vicious cycle is also responsible for the decline of the English language. He says that our desire for decadence in our speech and writing is only an indicator of how lazy we really are. So much in fact, that what we mean to say with simplicity, we muck up with what we think are fancy and high dollar words that only serve to lose the meaning of what we originally meant to say. The article in question "Politics and the English Language," was written in 1946. Here today over 60 years later, it seems that the most prominent writers and orators still resort to this way of thinking, that perhaps it is better to use familiar metaphors and shiny thesaurus words in order to appeal to their audiences. When reading this article, one could only think to ask why even today we seek the glamour, supposed mysticism of complex synonyms, and recycled metaphors at the expense of truth, meaning and reason found in the most basic forms of the English language. In other words, what drives writers to over compensate in language when what they mean to say is right in front of them? Perhaps through various forms of media we have allowed ourselves to become conditioned to think this way.

If you are an American, you live in a fast paced, cutthroat society that values articulation and poise and frowns upon the illiterate. In an environment that thrives on "better than the rest," the pressure to be the best is on, even if that means sounding like the most knowledgeable candidate while having no idea what is being said. In speaking on pretentious diction, Orwell holds that the simplest way in coining a new word is to tack on a "Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix," instead of choosing an English word to convey the meaning, as in impermissible or non-fragmentatory. Both of these words are multi-syllabic. To the untrained ear, they sound like they make sense though there are those who would not know that impermissible is easily substituted with "wrong" or "outrageous," just as there are people who still do not know that fragmentatory is not considered a word in the English language. The same principle applies to verbal false limbs. Small beginning phrases like render inoperative and exhibit a tendency to, are not common among people who speak a common or simple language. A person would

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