According to George Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English language” he refers characteristics of bad language as bad habits. Orwell’s essay is also written on a political perspective that show these bad habits used in the political language and how it is even corrupting. Orwell discusses that Political writing is inaccurate at times and can become ugly. Orwell explains this by saying that our “thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness for our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. George Orwell also focuses on four bad habits that are destructive in the English language. These bad habits include dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words.
Orwell elucidates that a Dying metaphor is a newly invented metaphor that is used by evoking a visual image. Orwell says that a metaphor is technically already “dead”, an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. “… There is a 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”. In Orwell’s discussion on Verbal false limbs, he says that these save the trouble of using proper verbs and nouns, and adding the appearance of symmetry in sentences. Such phrases include: render inoperative, be subjected to, give rise to, make itself felt, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The purpose is to eliminate simple verbs. Orwell adds that pretentious diction is another bad habit used in the English Language. He says that words like phenomenon, element, and objective are used to dress up simple statements and give scientific fairness to unfair judgments. Foreign words and phrases are used to give an atmosphere of culture and style. Orwell also argues “there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English”. “It is often easier to make up words than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness”. Furthermore, Orwell discusses that in certain kinds of writing, mainly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is common to come across long passages that are lacking in meaning. According to Orwell, words like romantic and sentimental are meaningless. Many political words are also abused. Such as the word fascism, it has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable'. He also argues “the people who use them have their private definitions, but allow their hearers to think they mean something quite different.” Orwell clearly argues that there is power in language and that it is used in politics to corrupt thought by using corrupt language.
In “Mother Tongue”, Amy Tan describes the use of language to a constructive extent. Tan explains her use of “different Englishes”, such as “a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases” and a language of intimacy used with her mother and husband. Tan is a first generation Chinese-American and language was something she always enjoyed. Being Chinese-American, Tan wanted to break the stereotype that Asian Americans pursue an engineering career. This motivated her to become a creative writer. When Tan discusses the English that her mother uses, she remembers a time that it limited her perception of her mother, and she mentions that she was ashamed of it as well. “That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect”, show how language can be destructive as well.
Each literary work has shown that language is both a constructive and destructive instrument of power. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s piece, language was critical but it also aided her to overcome her silence. In George Orwell’s essay bad habits in the English language were recognized and at the same time it advised writers not use such corrupt meaningless English. In Amy Tan’s piece, her mother’s “broken” English was at first to Tan embarrassing because of the imperfect English used. Although Tan uses methods of Standard English she also uses her “mother’s tongue” to write her stories, making her literature easy to read which is why she is successful in her writing. Having analyzed these selections, Language is both productive and critical either personal or political.
