The English language is a very powerful tool, it lets us express our mere thoughts and ideas to others. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley believed that "The magic of words lies in the influence they have on the brains of those who use them" . In both essays the writers criticize the way language is being used as a tool. Though both say between the lines the same thing, Orwell emphasizes on modern language and Huxley on political language.
These critics believed that words were "almost completely lacking in meaning" because of the overused euphanisms. Euphanisms have become a political tool to justify wrong acts and measures that hurt the nation. An example of euphanisms was written by Orwell . People cant say: "Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. At the same time Huxley wrote that people falsify some facts to makes them less harsh than what they really are and thus making tolerance easier. People prefer to "dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements." .
Orwell doesn't stop there. He emphasizes more on modern English as I said earlier. In his essay he lists some characteristics of this period to show how much the language has decayed. He believe that one of the reasons why English literature was crumbling was the "huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves." He also stressed on the way the modern artists wrote the abstract and that they used words that were stuck together and not looked for. .
Huxley's Words and behavior and Orwell's politics and the English language forces the readers to think. How much does our government manipulates our thoughts and beliefs? And how low has the English language gone? All I can answer is with Orwell's simple quote: "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".
