Politics and the English Language

I think it would do people a lot of good to read this, then take a look back at some posts you've made in the Serious Discussion forum, or research papers, or anything written formally. Most of us know when we're grasping at straws in an argument- I think you'll find a very strong correlation between those times and the, frankly, bullshit language that Orwell calls attention to. It's outdated and English rather than American, but it's still very accurate and makes our media look absolutely foolish.

Also very good to have as a reference in your back pocket when someone goes tangentially pseudo-intellectual in an attempt to defend a stance.

Is there a TL;DR version?

Don't try to sound smart, be smart. Keep it simple if you can. Bigger is not better.

I agree wholeheartedly. There are situations where larger words can demonstrate exactly what you want, but in most cases, simple is better.

As part of my capstone project in college, my group had to give a 15 minute presentation summarizing what we did over the course of a year. Between 4 people, this is difficult. The best presentation lasted 10-11 minutes and had many videos. Some people only had 2 slides with a few things on them. They didn't say a lot, but what they did say was straight and to the point. Granted, they only did 1 thing (a mechanical lift), and we did 3 things (driveway, 2 bioretention areas, 2 cisterns). Ours lasted 20ish because we couldn't summarize properly, and kept getting stuck on explaining shit.

Even in the academic community, people want things short and sweet.

In an argument where you want to win, however, you don't necessarily want to give your opponent what people want. The more complicated and convoluted the argument, the harder it is to counter.

Now you're getting into psychology. The problem is that you sound right, but you aren't. For a ruthless person who doesn't genuinely care about other people, then this is fine.

The point of debate is not to win.

Not everyone knows that.

Well, say your faced with trying to outsmart a group of orcs or trolls. Maybe you're even trying to outsmart bugbears. The point is, you need to win your argument. You could easily just complicate your sentences as to confuse the sub-humans, thus possibly saving your life.

If you wanted the semi-humans to actually understand why they were wrong in the argument, the more clear and concise you are the better the chances of them understanding are.

Orwell in general was a pretty smart guy.

I recommend you read all his stuff, but especially the non-fiction.

Any specific suggestions? It would take a few years to read everything he's written. =o

Sure. If you want to find out about what the Spanish Civil War was like from his perspective, read Homage to Catalonia.

My favourite work of his though is Down and Out in Paris and London. In it he goes through his own years of poverty in those two cities and he really has a talent for making the people he meets and the places he visits come alive, and it makes you realise how bloody difficult life must have been back then for the poor.

I love this.

It is necessary for an individual such as myself to state the clearly obvious fact that

Lol english... I can't defend any argument in that language, I do not have the required vocabulary. But i would laugh if anyone in the starcraft or any english-based ocmmunity tried to speak french like I speak english, I would always get the best arguments

Oh and I do like "winning" debates