“Fuck George Orwell,” the student was saying. “And fuck his middle-class, British values.” Teaching political writing at Brooklyn College, I’d (unoriginally) assigned Orwell’s famous essay, “Politics and the English Language.” The student was incensed by Orwell’s hostility to words and expressions with Greek and Latin roots, which the twentieth-century English writer considered pretentious. For Orwell, […]

This post was originally published on Jacobin.