Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

Accompanying the hysteria surrounding swine flu, I have noticed a particularly insidious piece of jargon, which, if it is does not yet constitute an epidemic amongst health professionals, is certainly rapidly becoming endemic. Rather than refer to the risk of death which the disease might pose, experts keep discussing the possibility of it precipitating a ‘mortality event’. A more obfuscating piece of doublespeak it is difficult to imagine. Could any phrase more neatly epitomise a living example of the type of English which George Orwell excoriated in his essays and satirised in his fiction? Doctors are already notorious for dancing around the truth. For many years it was established procedure to refer to all manner of ‘growths’ rather than tell a patient he or she had cancer. Sometimes, I imagine, it is beneficial to speak in language which only the initiated can interpret. But in a public debate about the possible effects of a disease, in which any sense of proportion has long ...

Some journalists have asked whether Orwell might have written a blog, had the technology been available to him, after the addition of a  weblog category  to the prize that bears his name. When a longlist comprising twelve websites was announced, Radio 4 invited  Hopi Sen to consider the question on its ‘Today’ programme. I suspect that while Orwell would have been enthused by the potential of political blogging, he would have been appalled by the content and style of many political blogs. For any writer who makes politics his subject, reading Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ is a chastening experience. Its contents are yet more disquieting when one has been included on a shortlist of six bloggers , contesting an award dedicated to the great man’s memory. The truth is that it is almost impossible to adhere to the precepts set out in the essay.  The essayist acknowledged that even he occasionally infringed his own rules. It is possible t...