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Politics and the English Language - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language

George Orwell

出版社

Penguin Classics

出版时间

2013-01-03

ISBN

9780141393063

评分

★★★★★

标签

写作乔治·奥威尔PoliticsEnglish

书籍介绍
'Politics and the English Language' is widely considered Orwell's most important essay on style. Style, for Orwell, was never simply a question of aesthetics; it was always inextricably linked to politics and to truth.'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.'Language is a political issue, and slovenly use of language and cliches make it easier for those in power to deliberately use misleading language to hide unpleasant political facts. Bad English, he believed, was a vehicle for oppressive ideology, and it is no accident that 'Politics and the English Language' was written after the close of World War II.
AI导读
核心看点
  • 奥威尔论写作风格与政治真相的深刻关联
  • 揭示陈词滥调如何掩盖政治谎言与压迫
  • 提供六条实用建议以恢复语言清晰与真诚
适合谁读
  • 追求文字精准、拒绝废话的写作者
  • 对政治修辞与媒体话语保持警惕的读者
  • 需要提升学术或公文写作质量的学子
读前提醒
  • 篇幅短小精悍，适合一次性快速读完
  • 文中吐槽犀利，请做好被‘打脸’准备
  • 建议对照自身写作习惯进行反思与修正
读者共识
  • 奥威尔笔触犀利，读来爽快且令人警醒
  • 核心观点穿越时空，对中文写作同样适用
  • 虽观点不新鲜，但真诚与克制仍值得推崇

本导读基于书籍简介、目录、原文摘录、短评和书评生成，不等同于全文精读。

精彩摘录
  • "I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,nor the battle to the strong,neither yet bread to the wise,nor yet riches to men of understanding,nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. 翻译很优美： 我又发现一件事，在这世上，善于赛跑的不一定得奖，勇敢的不一定打胜仗，聪明的人不一定有饭吃 ，机智的人不一定"
  • "....there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones"
  • "In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly mean"
  • "In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he m"
  • "When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer."
  • "A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put i"
  • "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting our ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues a"
  • "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupts thought."
作者简介
Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen-name, George Orwell, was born in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. An author and journalist, Orwell was one of the most prominent and influential figures in twentieth-century literature. His unique political allegory Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame. His novels and non-fiction include Burmese Days, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.
用户评论
一言以蔽之，"let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about." 奥威尔总是这么正三观！！btw企鹅🐧的小书也太可爱啦 <33
听君一席话，胜读十年书
第一次读奥威尔的时候对作者简介中“文体家”这一头衔颇感疑惑，如今理解了。联系“新话”，语言当然是政治的反映——并起到强烈的正反馈作用。追求一种晓畅、易懂而又精确的文风，好过任语言在陈腐的修辞与辞藻堆砌中腐烂。
第一篇的嘲讽毫不留情，第二篇review犀利吐血…
"Words like romantic, plastic,values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless."
大快人心，下次读不懂东西就自信跳过。“The German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years as a result of dictatorship.”无新事发生。
某天晚上听时事政治评论节目时提到的一本书立刻上网去找了，写得太好啦！提到的一些情况之前有见过所以深有同感
某老师扬起脸讲，文章要平实流畅，别把文章写成奥威尔举的反例里那样的nonsense。听了让人要连滚带爬去书店买小册子贡起来的程度。读了之后感觉以前写的essay真的很多可有可无的废话。
Pick out words for the sake of their meaning and invent images in order to make the meaning clearer. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. While the political phraseology functions just the other way around, it blurs the meaning, using specified words to avoid calling up mental pictures.
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